Chernobyl Zone:
A World of Radiation and Death 

SERGEI SHARGORODSKY / AP 15dec00

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine — At first glance, it looks the same as the outside world: forests, fields and streams, peaceful village houses. But barbed-wire fences, radiation warning signs and checkpoints caution visitors that they are entering a different land.

It's called the "Zone," a term lifted from a Soviet science fiction novel written by the Strugatsky brothers more than a decade before the April 26, 1986, Chernobyl nuclear plant accident.

Here the rivers, land and trees are poisoned by radiation, and a closer look reveals that the quiet wooden houses are crumbling structures abandoned 14 years ago.

Barred to outsiders by about 800 guards, the 19-mile-radius zone around Chernobyl absorbed the bulk of the radioactive fallout from the 1986 explosion and fire. It covers 1,400 square miles and was once home to 120,000 people who lived in 90 communities.

Winding roads now lead to ruined settlements. In a field, nearly 1,400 contaminated vehicles and aircraft used in the Chernobyl cleanup are rusting.

The forests are rich in berries, mushrooms and animals, including some exotic varieties like the Przhevalsky horses brought here to eat and stamp out the high grass which is highly contaminated by radiation.

Pripyat, once the area's largest city and home to 48,000 people before the accident, is a ghost town of apartment high-rises still sporting Communist Party slogans and Soviet-era symbols, overgrown bushes and an abandoned playground with a motionless Ferris wheel and broken toy cars.

Electric poles and wires announce the approach to the Chernobyl plant itself. A giant red structure surrounded by rusty cranes is the remnant of two unfinished reactors. A sprawling building behind a fence houses reactors No. 1 and No. 2.

A bust of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin greets visitors at the plant's entrance. Next to it stands a curvy modernist statue, a memorial to those who died trying to contain the 1986 catastrophe.

Farther away is a huge building, its single smokestack supported by metal bearings. This is where it all happened 14 years ago.

At one end is reactor No. 3, Chernobyl's last working one, which was stopped for good on Friday. The building's other reactor, No. 4, is encased in a 1.1-million-ton sarcophagus that looks like a haphazard assortment of cement and rust-streaked steel plates.

Beneath is all that remains of reactor No. 4, a maze of collapsed ceilings, corridors littered with debris, and bizarre cankers produced by melted nuclear fuel that no human can approach without being killed by radiation.

Just one brick-sized piece of fuel that recently fell onto the sarcophagus roof emits deadly radiation. And radiation on a balcony facing the sarcophagus is about 80 times normal background levels.

The road out of the zone passes through the "Red Forest" — trees so damaged by radiation that they took on a reddish hue. Today, most of the forest is dead, and only a few dried trees stretch out their branches in a silent reminder of the century's worst nuclear accident.

MORE. . .

The Chernobyl power plant lies in northern Ukraine, near the border with Belarus. Both countries border Poland to the west and Russia to the east. In the former Soviet Union, Belarus and Ukraine were the two westernmost states.

The Chernobyl power plant is about 7 km from the border with Belarus, while about 120 km to the south lies Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, with a population of about 3 million. The reactor complex, which has been inactive since 12 December 2000, stands by the river Pripyat, which joins the Dnieper at the town of Chernobyl, 12 km away.

The Accident

On 25 April, prior to a routine shut-down, the reactor crew at Chernobyl-4 began preparing for a test to determine how long turbines would spin and supply power following a loss of main electrical power supply. Similar tests had already been carried out at Chernobyl and other Soviet plants, despite the fact that these reactors were known to be very unstable at low power settings.

A series of operator actions, including the disabling of automatic shutdown mechanisms, preceded the attempted test early on 26 April. As flow of coolant water diminished, power output increased. When the operator moved to shut down the reactor from its unstable condition arising from previous errors, a peculiarity of the design caused a dramatic power surge.

The fuel elements ruptured and the resultant explosive force of steam lifted off the cover plate of the reactor, releasing fission products to the atmosphere. A second explosion threw out fragments of burning fuel and graphite from the core and allowed air to rush in, causing the graphite moderator to burst into flames.

There is some dispute among experts about the character of this second explosion. The graphite burned for nine days, causing the main release of radioactivity from the reactor into the environment. A total of about 12 x 1018 Bq of radioactivity was released.

Some 5000 tonnes of boron, dolomite, sand, clay and lead were dropped on to the burning core by helicopter in an effort to extinguish the blaze and limit the release of radioactive particles.

Which areas were contaminated by radiation? In the night of 25 to 26 April 1986, the explosion of the reactor in Chernobyl, the greatest industrial disaster in the history of humankind, released one hundred times more radiation than the atom bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In addition to the reactor's immediate surroundings — an area with a radius of about 30 km — other regions were contaminated, particularly in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.

The contaminated territories lie in the north of Ukraine, the south and east of Belarus and in the western border area between Russia and Belarus. International estimates suggest that a total of between 125 000 and 146 000 km2 in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine are contaminated with caesium-137 at levels exceeding 1 curie (Ci) or 3.7 x 1010 becquerel (Bq) per square kilometre. This is an area greater than that of the neighbouring countries of Latvia and Lithuania combined. At the time of the accident, about 7 million people lived in the contaminated territories, including 3 million children. About 350 400 people were resettled or left these areas. However, about 5.5 million people, including more than a million children, continue to live in the contaminated zones

Most of the contaminated territory lies in Belarus, since up to 70 per cent of the total fallout was deposited here. Of the total area of Belarus, 22 per cent was contaminated with more than 1 Ci/km2 caesium-137. At the time of the accident, 2.2 million people lived in these areas, one fifth of the population of Belarus. 7.25 per cent of Ukraine's territory was contaminated following the accident, and 0.6 per cent of the Russian Federation.

source: http://www.altera.by/eng/articles/chernobyl_accident_overview.eng.htm  26apr2006