Remembering Chernobyl 20 years later.

On April 26, 1986, reactor #4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, 100 km north from Kyiv, exploded during a routine daily operation.

In the early morning hours of April 26, 1986, reactor No. 4 was operating at very low capacity (6 - 7 percent) during a planned shutdown. Plant personnel intended to monitor the performance of turbine generators, which supplied electric power for the plant's own operation, during a changeover from standard to a backup source of power.

The reactor's design made it unstable at low power, and the operators were careless about safety precautions during the test. After a sudden power surge, two explosions destroyed the reactor core and blasted a large hole in the roof of the reactor building. Radioactive debris moved up through this hole to heights of 1 km (0.6 mi), carried by a strong updraft. Fires caused by the explosion and the heat of the reactor core fed the updraft.

Nearly 9 tons of radioactive material - 90 times as much as the Hiroshima bomb - were hurled into the sky. Over the following days, winds that were blowing mostly north and west, carried the fallout into Belarus, as well as Russia, Poland and the Baltic region. The radioactive fallout affected 23% of Belarus, with 4.8% of Ukrainian territory and 0.5% of Russian land exposed. About 200,000 people were evacuated from a 30-km radius around the plant, with the peripheral areas remaining at a high risk of radioactive exposure. The reactor was enclosed in a concrete-and-steel sarcophagus. Over the following years about 600,000 people known as "the liquidators" worked on the clean-up operations inside the 30-km zone.Although scientists agree that there is no risk of the sarcophagus exploding, the status of the estimated 180 tons of radioactive material trapped inside the nuclear power plant is still unclear.There are many commemorative events scheduled during the month of April which I encourage all of you to participate in. If you have any information that you'd like to share with the group, please list your info here!