It looked as if the worst-case scenario was now coming to pass.Įarlier in the day, experts had predicted a possible chain reaction starting as soon as the reactor emerged from the temporarily disabling iodine well. “It was a striking spectacle,” remembered one of the commission’s experts who observed the scene from the third floor of the Prypiat party headquarters, where the high commission was housed. Three powerful explosions illuminated the dark red sky above the damaged reactor, sending red-hot pieces of fuel rods and graphite into the air. Soon after 9:00 p.m., while the members of the commission were brainstorming, the reactor suddenly awakened. Instead, Gorbachev approved the creation of a state commission to look into the causes of the explosion and deal with its consequences.

He saw no need to awaken other members of the Soviet leadership or interrupt the weekend by calling an emergency session of the Politburo.

“In the first hours and even the first day after the accident there was no understanding that the reactor had exploded and that there had been a huge nuclear emission into the atmosphere,” remembered Gorbachev later. The message: There had been an explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, but the reactor was intact. on April 26, awakening the most powerful man in the land, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. Here, the author of Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe describe s the dramatic exodus from Prypiat, a city of 50,000 located a few miles from the damaged reactor. In all, 50 million curies of radiation were released into the atmosphere-the equivalent of 500 Hiroshima bombs. A reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine exploded, spreading radioactive clouds all over Europe and a large part of the globe.

In the early hours of April 26, 1986, the world witnessed the worst nuclear catastrophe in history.

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