Chernobyl in pictures: 33 years after the nuclear disaster, what happened today?

On Saturday, April 26, 1986, the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin nuclear power plant, today in northern Ukraine and at that time in the USSR, launched into the sky a cloud of uranium dioxide, boron carbide, europium oxide, erbium, zirconium and graphite …, five hundred times bigger than the historical mushroom of Hiroshima (August 1945), birth of the atomic era.

Two employees died on the floor and twenty others died within the next three months. Their bodies were buried in a huge hole in the ground. After being closed, their coffins were deposited in other sarcophagi, but in lead, sealed by a weld around them and, finally, the ghostly tomb was covered with tons of cement.

Unlike the Egyptian sarcophagi, whose jaws were opened very often and presented the embalmed pharaohs, one must never open the fascinating ossuary of Chernobyl: some of the poisons that have contaminated the bodies can last up to twenty-four thousand years!

The disaster and the Chernobyl tragedy, as well as the 2011 Fukushima I nuclear explosion in Japan, are the worst on the international nuclear accident scale and are also among the biggest environmental disasters.

The Chernobyl explosion occurred in reactor 4: an uncontrolled overheating of the core of the nuclear reactor, which exploded its lid, of twelve hundred tons, and released materials forming a radioactive cloud that affected, at different intensities , thirteen Eastern countries: Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Scandinavia and much of Western Europe.

The accident occurred during a safety test (power reduction). But also by a series of blunders, shortcomings, late reactions of employees, and in a fatal moment: the change of quarter of one of the three endowments, which did not let the time to l '. night shift, just to arrive, to react according to the protocol. But in reality, the security test had to be completed in the first quarter, in the morning, but for reasons of negligence or other reasons that had never been properly explained, the plan was not executed and the responsibility lay with Alexander Akimov, head of the last quarter, Leonid Toptunov, responsible for the operational regime of the reactor, who shortly before dying of atrocious burns, said that he had pressed the button AZ-5 (rapid emergency defense) ), but that it was too late.

Day after day, the deadly consequences have increased. Shortly after the explosion, a thousand people suffered the greatest amount of pollutants: a safe death in the short or long term.

The shock wave affected, also to varying degrees, the six hundred thousand souls who worked on the decontamination, the four hundred thousand who lived in the areas closest to the collapse of the reactor, and have left unharmed none of the five million who lived there. villages and neighborhoods of the region reached by tentacles of poison.

But the tragedy suffered from another backdrop: the irresponsibility of the hierarchs of the Soviet regime, who decided, like everything that happened behind the Iron Curtain, to hide the disaster. "Let the world know not"was the ridiculous slogan: before this closed meeting, Sweden, Switzerland and England had already received obvious signs of the explosion.

The Kremlin bigwigs named Boris Shcherbin, deputy prime minister – who did not know everything about a nuclear power station – and soon confronted high-ranking physicist Valere Legasov.

While they came from the luxurious offices of super-bureaucrats, news of hope ("It was a small incident," "Nobody is in danger," "Stay calm with their lives") and something worse: they refused to evacuate, were broadcast to the public. in time, directly infected populations to avoid panic – a criminal decision – whose inhabitants will suffer over time the clbadic consequences of radioactivity: cancer, babies born with deformities, diseases of the lung and liver.

The difficult struggle between the physicist Legasov and the ignorant puppet Shcherbin, finally, won first. But also late. A squadron of helicopters bombed the reactor, whose graphite ceiling burned incessantly, with loads of sand, clay, lead, dolomite, and boron. But many devices fell engulfed by the smoke column … and none of the charges hit the target.

The nearest environs of the nuclear power station were subjected to a radiation of twenty thousand roentgens per hour, so that many inhabitants received lethal doses in less than a minute. Thanks to the firefighters and their hard work during the first three hours of the accident, the fire of reactor 4 did not extend to the entire nuclear power plant.

In violation of safety regulations, the roof of reactor building 3 was constructed with a mixture of bitumen, a highly combustible material: while the hierarchies continued to send signals that "nothing serious is happening".

On 14 May, eighteen days after the collapse, Secretary-General Mikhail Gorbachev read a lengthy report in which he acknowledged the magnitude of the tragedy. But the international press accused him of minimizing its collateral effects, which, however, were already beginning to affect almost half of the world.

The main pollutants released by Chernobyl are the radioactive iodine, strontium and cesium, which are on the soil surface and are absorbed by plants, insects, animals and fungi, which then invade the chain food.

After the disaster, the green pine trees in an area near the reactor turned golden brown and died. Today, this vegetable cemetery is called "Red Forest". In addition, all European countries affected by pollution are still subject to strict controls on wild boar meat, deer and other game, as well as flora.

The Chernobyl reactor 4 was surrounded by a protective sarcophagus, but the weather, radiation, heat and corrosion from the concealed materials degraded it slowly, so that in November 2016, thirty years after the tragedy, ushered in the NSC (New Safe Sarcophagus), mobile, bent, one hundred and ten meters high, one hundred and fifty meters wide and two hundred and fifty-six long and over thirty thousand tons of weight, calculated to last one hundred years .

The explosion, its deaths, its patients, the disregard for the protocols and the concealment of the truth, are also, and with clear signals, a painful symbol of the end of the Soviet regime, which occurred three years later with a non-nuclear noise and libertario: the fall of the wall of Berlin.

When it seemed that the world, with the exception of the one that was close to horror, had forgotten Chernobyl, a series of HBO and British Sky not only revived this horror : a survey gathering more than eighty thousand viewers voted for "the best of history" (average: 9.7 points out of 10), beat the old and the new: the good fight, Killing Eve, Veep, Fleabag, Breaking Bad, The Brothers Group, Planet Earth and Game of Thrones.

The two main characters, the physicist and the bureaucrat, embody them with a great level of actor, in that order, Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgard. Apparently, young people are ahead of the fans of the series called Chernobyl: a fact that may reveal a concern for the fate of the planet that has not crossed previous generations.

Infobae and La Nación