Reactor 4 at Chernobyl. It took the then-Soviet government 36 hours to declare an emergency and begin evacuation in 1986

March 12 2022 UPDATE

Thirty-five years ago the world’s worst nuclear crisis occurred at Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear facility.   Today Chernobyl is back in Russian hands ! Russia’s incursion into the sovereign nation of Ukraine means death, destruction and a humanitarian crisis at an unprecedented scale in Europe since World War II — and leaves major unanswered questions about the fragility and stability of the various Chernobyl sites and buildings now under occupation,  in a war that Russia has precipitated.

We are reposting the Green News Update story from the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster — so you get the backstory and understand the decades of impacts on human life and on the environment. Today the world watches and waits to see whether Ukraine and Chernobyl can resist the Russian invasion. 

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[April 26, 2016] Today is Chernobyl ‘s 30^th anniversary– and the impacts of the world’s worst nuclear power plant disaster (yes, they say, worse than Fukushima in 2011) are still being felt in wildlife that remain in the “Exclusion Zone”  and humans who fled the contamination. Scientists continue to study how exposure to high levels of radiation are affecting everything from spiders and birds, to wild dogs and wolves. (See below for documentaries and photo essays below). Many agencies including the World Health Organization continue to track the trail of disease and death to humans.

Workers at Chernobyl pre-disaster

How it started

On  April 26, 1986, the explosion and fire in Number 4, one of the four 1,000-watt operating power reactors–on the Pripyat River, just 60 miles from Kiev-– experienced a power surge, then a larger spike, during a bungled test.  The reactor vessel ruptured, a series of radioactive steam explosions occurred, and the combustible graphite moderator ignited, causing a fire that went on for 10 days.

Thousands of people were exposed to cesium-137, strontium-90, iodine-131 – the deadly radioactive isotopes in the nuclear fission process– expelled in the bursts of steam and particles that wafted over western Soviet Union and Europe. Some 350,000 people were evacuated from Chernobyl and other areas of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine; some 530,000 local recovery workers, without adequate protective gear, experienced exposure “equivalent to an extra 50 years [per person] of typical background radiation exposure.”

A shocking fact: the Soviet government waited 36 hours to call for the general population evacuation!

New safe confinement arch to cover the reactor, was completed in 2019. 

Now almost a generation later, a giant steel-clad arch is nearing completion [completed in 2019] to enclosure the reactor site, at a cost of $1.7 billion euros, paid for by more than 40 governments and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The original Exclusion Zone – the size of Luxembourg – will shrink to about 1,000 square miles of uninhabitable land. See the 30^th anniversary article

Suiting up conscripted soldiers and locals to deal with the 1986 disaster.

The final toll of disease and death has yet to be tallied and remains the subject of intense debate.  The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates:  ” [A]mong hundreds of millions of people living in broader geographic areas there will be 50,000 excess cancer cases resulting in 25,000 excess cancer deaths.”

Wolf in an abandoned village in the Exclusion Zone

What happened to nature ?

An Exclusion Zone – the size of Luxembourg – was established by the Soviet government,  leaving a no-man’s land of buildings, schools, parks and wild spaces for the past 30 years.

According to a Nature documentary (PBS), “ In the ensuing 25 years, forests, marshes, fields and rivers reclaimed the land, reversing the effects of hundreds of years of human development. And surprisingly, this exclusion zone, or ‘dead zone,’ has become a kind of post-nuclear Eden, populated by beaver and bison, horses and birds, fish and falcons – and ruled by wolves.” See the full episode of Nature on the Wolves of Chernobyl (53 minutes).

Wolves feed on carcass of a wild bison

Scientists from the US, Germany, Ukraine and other countries continue to investigate Chernobyl’s animal populations, in particular,  to see how wolves have adapted to life in a radioactive zone. The premise is that if the top predators are doing well, the prey must be available too.

Prof Vadim Siderovich finds fresh wolf litter in an uncontaminated control study area

Review of genetic studies  (comparing Chernobyl and Fukushima) in a recent publication of the Journal of Heredity find,  “The few genetic studies that have been conducted in Chernobyl generally show elevated rates of genetic damage and mutation rates. All major taxonomic groups investigated (i.e., birds, bees, butterflies, grasshoppers, dragonflies, spiders, mammals) displayed reduced population sizes in highly radioactive parts of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.” (Source: Dr. Timothy Mousseau from the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and Anders Møller, Journal of Heredity

Christoph and Barbara Promberger get ready to place wolf traps for radio collarinjg. They are fully suited up to avoid contaminated soil or radioactive hair from wolves.

Today, it’s possible as a tourist to take a limited visit to Chernobyl under strict controls. Despite the continuing danger from contaminated soil and surfaces, some intrepid loggers are moving into the area to log timber from trees felled by fire, as well as healthy pines that end up on the market in  Europe and sold to unsuspecting homebuilders ! Recent New York Times article

To learn and see more, go to

Inside the exclusion zone photo slide show

Studying flora and fauna, The New York Times (slide show)

PBS Frontline readings on Chernobyl

Endnote 

“Without question, the accident at Chernobyl was the result of a fatal combination of ignorance and complacency,”  says Richard Rhodes in Nuclear Renewal,  A Matter of Risk. ‘As members of a select scientific panel convened immediately after the…accident,’ writes Bethe, ‘my colleagues and I established that the Chernobyl disaster tells us about the deficiencies of the Soviet political and administrative system rather than about problems with nuclear power.” Nuclear Renewal,  A Matter of Risk, Richard Rhodes (Chapter 5), Penguin Books 1993.