The Chernobyl Disaster
On April 26, 1986, the world's worst nuclear power plant accident occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. Thirty-two people died and dozens more suffered radiation burns in the opening days of the crisis, but only after Swedish authorities reported the fallout did Soviet authorities reluctantly admitted that an accident had occurred.
The Chernobyl station was situated at the settlement of Pripyat, about 65 miles north of Kiev in Ukraine. Built in the late 1970s on the banks of the Pripyat River, Chernobyl had four reactors, each capable of producing 1,000 megawatts of electric power. On the evening of April 25, 1986, a group of engineers began an electrical-engineering experiment on the Number 4 reactor. The engineers, who had little knowledge of reactor physics, wanted to see if the reactor's turbine could run emergency water pumps on inertial power.
As part of their poorly designed experiment, the engineers disconnected the reactor's emergency safety systems and its power-regulating system. Next, they compounded this recklessness with a series of mistakes: They ran the reactor at a power level so low that the reaction became unstable, and then removed too many of the reactor's control rods in an attempt to power it up again. The reactor's output rose to more than 200 megawatts but was proving increasingly difficult to control. Nevertheless, at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, the engineers continued with their experiment and shut down the turbine engine to see if its inertial spinning would power the reactor's water pumps. In fact, it did not adequately power the water pumps, and without cooling water the power level in the reactor surged.
To prevent meltdown, the operators reinserted all the 200-some control rods into the reactor at once. The control rods were meant to reduce the reaction but had a design flaw: graphite tips. So, before the control rod's five meters of absorbent material could penetrate the core, 200 graphite tips simultaneously entered, thus facilitating the reaction and causing an explosion that blew off the heavy steel and concrete lid of the reactor. It was not a nuclear explosion, as nuclear power plants are incapable of producing such a reaction, but was chemical, driven by the ignition of gases and steam that were generated by the runaway reaction. In the explosion and ensuing fire, more than 50 tons of radioactive material were released into the atmosphere, where it was carried by air currents.
On April 27, Soviet authorities began an evacuation of the 30,000 inhabitants of Pripyat. A cover-up was attempted, but on April 28 Swedish radiation monitoring stations, more than 800 miles to the northwest of Chernobyl, reported radiation levels 40 percent higher than normal. Later that day, the Soviet news agency acknowledged that a major nuclear accident had occurred at Chernobyl.
In the opening days of the crisis, 32 people died at Chernobyl and dozens more suffered radiation burns. The radiation that escaped into the atmosphere, which was several times that produced by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was spread by the wind over Northern and Eastern Europe, contaminating millions of acres of forest and farmland. An estimated 5,000 Soviet citizens eventually died from cancer and other radiation-induced illnesses caused by their exposure to the Chernobyl radiation, and millions more had their health adversely affected. In 2000, the last working reactors at Chernobyl were shut down and the plant was officially closed
Did the Chernobyl disaster lead to the fall of the Soviet Union?
The Soviet Union tried to cover the whole thing up, making only a vague announcement about the explosion after two days had passed. The world only became aware of the true horror of the accident once a radioactive cloud that had drifted into Sweden was sourced back to Chernobyl. Just six years later the Soviet Union ceased to exist, as dissent amongst citizens, once completely satisfied with, and trusting of, their government, grew over issues such as public safety and political transparency.
Gorbachev states that Chernobyl was “perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Before the Chernobyl accident occurred Gorbachev had already introduced his glasnost policy which was aimed at increasing the transparency between the state and its citizens, yet what was expected to be a step by step incremental and slow process exploded after the accident.
Michael David-Fox, a professor of Russian and Soviet history at Georgetown University, also admitted that the disaster at Chernobyl may have hastened the implementation of the glasnost policy which eventually led to the dismantling of the Soviet Union.
As horror stories about Chernobyl and the nuclear radiation poisoning that followed began to spread, the citizens of the Soviet Union began to lose faith in the state’s ability to inform and protect them; the government quickly began to lose control over its public. Whereas before the people believed in the Soviet system, and trusted that it had led them to be the leading power in the world. After Chernobyl they realized that they were hopeless compared to many western countries, and that the system was flawed and potentially dangerous.