The battle of Chernobyl

Hello everybody!

The other day in our English lesson we were watching a documentary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Basically what it says is that 30 years ago in Chernobyl on the 26^th April in 1986 the most serious nuclear accident ever has taken place.

The employees from the reactor block 4 have been ordered to carry out a test on the reactor to safe energy. But something went wrong and the reactor exploded. Two man officially died in that night and 28 men in the following month but the unofficial death rate is way higher. The first few days nobody knew about this accident, no one was informed. Not even Michail Gorbatschow, who was the President of the Soviet Union at that time.

Prypat, a city with about 43 000 inhabitants, is located 3 kilometres away from the reactor. A few hours after the accident the radioactivity was 600 000 times higher than normal. It took 48 hours for them to evacuate the city, about 1000 buses were sent to Prypat to pick up all the people.

Besides that the accident contaminated the land nearby, clouds were contaminated with radioactivity particles and were blown north by the wind. They drifted over 1000 kilometres from Russia, over Belarus up to Sweden, where the radioactive dust rained down.

Until now there is no statistic which shows the number of people who were contaminated. One week after the accident 130 000 people were evacuated and 300 000 hectare land isolated from the rest of the world.

Today 30 years after this nuclear accident, the city Chernobyl is a ghost town. No one ever returned.

Regards

Jakob