The town of Chernobyl (Chornobyl) is about 15-18 kilometers (9-11 miles) southeast of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, while the plant is located near the now-abandoned city of Pripyat, which was built for plant workers and is just a few kilometers from the reactors. The plant itself is about 100-130 km (62-81 miles) north of Kyiv, Ukraine.
The old town of Chernobyl, which had a population of 12 500, is about 15 km to the South-east of the complex. Within a 30-km radius of the power plant, the total population was between 115 000 and 135 000.
Yes, Chernobyl is still highly radioactive in many areas, especially near the damaged reactor, but radiation levels vary significantly; some parts of the exclusion zone have contamination low enough for potential limited agriculture, while a 2025 drone strike damaged the New Safe Confinement (NSC) structure, raising concerns about long-term containment, although immediate levels stayed stable as the NSC's function is to contain the original sarcophagus's radioactive material, not the entire zone.
On 26 April 1986, the no. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located near Pripyat, a city in the Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union (later Ukraine), exploded.
According to official reports, thirty-one people died immediately and 600,000 “liquidators,” involved in fire-fighting and clean-up operations, were exposed to high doses of radiation.
Iodine, strontium and caesium were the most dangerous of the elements released, and have half-lives of 8 days, 29 years, and 30 years respectively. The isotopes Strontium-90 and Caesium-137 are therefore still present in the area to this day. While iodine is linked to thyroid cancer, Strontium can lead to leukaemia.
The blame for the 1986 Chernobyl disaster has been variously attributed to the operating personnel, the plant management, the design of the reactor, and the lack of adequate safety information in the Soviet nuclear industry.
Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bespalov and Boris Baranov are the three men who made up Chernobyl's so-called 'Suicide Squad'. They bravely entered the basement of the nuclear reactor to try and save the lives of millions of people.
How long will Chernobyl stay radioactive? Scientific estimates suggest some radioactive areas may be habitable within 30-60 years, while heavily contaminated areas will stay radioactive for over a millennium.
The fire burned for 10 days, releasing a large amount of radiation into the atmosphere. The Chernobyl plant did not have the fortified containment structure common to most nuclear power plants elsewhere in the world. Without this protection, radioactive material escaped into the environment.
Why can't a scientist say just remove the elephant foot? This mass of death is a huge blob of radioactive goo that formed after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. It's made of corium, which is a mix of melted nuclear fuel and other stuff that got melted by the heat and radiation.
Radiation from Chernobyl caused mutations in animals, harming their health and ability to reproduce. Many animals in the Chernobyl exclusion zone are radioactive and some, like birds, show physical abnormalities.
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster was a catastrophic accident, BBC Science Focus looks at whether this could happen again. Probably not.
Boris Stolyarchuk IIRC is still alive today. He was in the control room. Igor Kirschenbaum, was a turbine operator in the control room, hes still alive as of a few years ago and lives in Israel. Yuri Tregub was also in the control room - alive as of 2021 IIRC.
Obviously you can no longer see the actual reactor as it's hiddent underneath the new "sarcophagus" they finished buliding in 2016. However, you can get quite close to the strcture and for those who go inside the power plant, you can actually go inside the Control Room #4, where the accident basically started.
In Russian and Ukrainian, the word “Chernobyl” means black weed and is a member of the wormwood family. The Ukrainian city of Chernobyl was so named after the abundance of this weed growing in and around the city.
And the main difference is - Chernobyl had no containment vessel, so the radiation was not contained. BWR's in Fukushima have, and radiation was mostly contained. There are approximations saying that fukushima had 1/10 radiation leaked to the outside compared to Chernobyl.
Cherenkov radiation is a form of energy that we can perceive as a blue glow emitted when the electrically charged particles that compose atoms (i.e. electrons and protons) are moving at speeds faster than that of light in a specific medium.
In a landmark 2023 study, the research team discovered evidence of genetic differences between canine populations living in two distinct areas of the CEZ, suggesting Chernobyl's dogs could have adapted to chemical and environmental exposures over generations.
All six were found guilty and Dyatlov was given the maximum sentence of ten years. From prison, he wrote letters trying to explain RBMK reactor flaws he had discovered, as well as to restore his and the other operators' reputations.
In April 1988, a top Soviet scientist, Valery Legasov, died by suicide. He was 51 years old. Before his death, he recorded a series of chilling deathbed confessions concerning one of the world's deadliest disasters: the Chernobyl nuclear explosion.
The three men would live longer than a few weeks and none would succumb to ARS, as modern myth would have you believe. As of 2015, it was reported that two of the men were still alive and still working within the industry. The third man, Boris Baranov, passed away in 2005 of a heart attack.
During the test, Akimov called for the AZ-5 (scram) button to be pressed to shut down the reactor, and Toptunov operated the button.
Chernobyl liquidators were the civil and military personnel who were called upon to deal with the consequences of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union on the site of the event. The liquidators are widely credited with limiting both the immediate and long-term damage from the disaster.
While there were many factors that contributed to the disaster, one man in particular has become synonymous with the Chernobyl tragedy and its aftermath – Anatoly Dyatlov.