Sarcophagus Earthquake

Not many people fully know what happened at Chernobyl, or understand the effect it has had on today’s nuclear science. Chernobyl has been named as the largest man-made disaster ever recorded. Chernobyl is the most influential and important event during the 1980’s because it has completely changed how the world views anything nuclear by changing experimentation and usage of nuclear materials and power as a whole. It was extremely influential because it caused thousands of people to move out of their homes, while damaging nearby cities and countries and covering the surrounding area in radioactive smog, and is still a threat to surrounding cities and countries today. It also has caused the nearby area to be thriving with wildlife.

(1)At 1:23 am on April 26th 1986, 2 explosions devastated a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl. These explosions unleashed huge amounts of toxic radiation into the atmosphere. This radiation created a toxic plume of radiation that not only devastated Chernobyl but affected almost the whole of Europe. It started with total evacuation of the city, this started within 24 hours of the disaster and immediately an exclusion zone was in place. What the Ukrainian officials didn’t know at the time is just how serious this was. The wind blew the plumes created by this explosion one plume north and one plume west. The plumes were highly toxic and had been contaminated by the nuclear radiation. The radiation going west even reached north wales and many parts of Scotland and the south of Ireland. The radiation going north badly affected Finland, Sweden and parts of Norway. To put that into perspective the disaster released at least 100 times more radiation than the atom bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

By November 1986, in order to limit a further release of radiation, the nuclear reactor was encased in concrete, with a long term planned completion of the Chernobyl cleanup by 2065 (Peplow, 563). After the disaster, a vast amount of the land was inhabitable due to the high levels of radiation, this in turn caused a decline in industry and agriculture, and increased the unemployment rate forcing citizens to migrate outside of the affected areas to find work (van der Veen, 126). These declines precipitated psychosocial impacts on the citizens with a “downward spiral of anxiety, depression, apathy, and fatalism” (van der Veen, 126). The increased burden on the Soviet finances, with the enormous costs of cleanup, relocation, compensation, and ongoing health care for those citizens affected, a need for further financial assistance from the IMF and World Bank could only possibly occur if they were to change their economy in agreement with the West’s negations (van der Veen,

Katrine Volynsky is a Chernobyl survivor. She was exposed to radiation in Chernobyl as a child. Katrine’s family lived in the Ukraine in April 1986 when the accident happened in Chernobyl due to a flawed reactor design and poorly trained personnel. Her family moved after the accident to a different area where they were told it

Radiation was passed on from cows. During Chernobyl radioactive iodine was deposited in pastures. Pastures are the homes of many farm animals such as cows. The cows ate the radioactive iodine, so they were contaminated. Milk is sold to the stores, and set on the shelves for the people to buy. Children then drank the contaminated milk, so they got thyroid cancer,

Studies show that between 140 and 280 deaths had happened form radiation exposure alone. Survivors showed a greater-than-usual incidence of leukemia early on, and an ever-increasing rate of other types of cancers as the years wears on, much greater

(MP1) What Chernobyl plant represented in 1980s and who is responsible for such a massive disaster

The Soviet Union, after World War II, had begun building many facilities for nuclear reprocessing using many radioactive components. The Russian government, being behind in the nuclear era, decided they needed to move quickly and start producing a sustainable nuclear chain reaction with secrecy. One of these facilities they built was so discreet it wasn't on any official maps at that time. In the town of Ozyorsk, Russia they built the Mayak nuclear fuel processing complex. This particular accident has been titled and associated with Kryshtym because that was the closest town on an official map that they could categorize it with. They built this complex between 1945 and 1948 to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. Since they had to move fast at building this complex, as well as poor understanding or little education of nuclear safety, and major disregards for human wellness, the systems were poorly built. They used what is called an open cycle cooling system, in which they pumped the water back and forth into their water source. Their main water source was Lake Karachay, as well as the Tech River. All 6 reactors that the Mayak nuclear complex had used the open cycle cooling system. They used huge lids weighing 160 tons for the tops of these radioactive components and systems, and even had them buried 8.2 meters (27 feet) under ground. With these cooling systems being built with the eager notion to be ahead in the nuclear era, they weren't prepared for any kind of error. If

The results were rapidly showcasing the devastating effects of radiation as survivors from the bombings began to die from radiation sickness. Research done by (Douple, Evan B., et al.) found that excess leukemia deaths became the first major radiation-associated long-term health effects followed by solid-cancer deaths. These studies concur with the findings of Shull, W. J. (1998) in which he discovers that the immediate effects of radiation on the human health were: an increase in the occurrence of “ radiation cataracts,” an increase in the frequency of acute leukemia, and an increase in mental retardation among those survivors exposed prenatally. His studies also showed that toward the end of 1950s, there was in increase in thyroid cancer and soon thereafter cancer of the breast, lung and

There have been lots of nuclear accident around the world. One of the accident that had a major impact on the world was the Chernobyl disaster. The disaster took place on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. The disaster was caused by a reaction explosion induced by design faults and staff application errors. The accident took place in the course of scheduled tests to check the power supply mode in the event of external sources loss. Even after 10 days, explosions and ejections of radioactive substances continued. The release of radiation and radioactive substance polluted the places within 30 km of Chernobyl, and those areas have been closed for a long period of

Specifically, the governments of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, at times dispute significant evidence which scientists and experts provide, in regards to the impacts of the nuclear disaster. Petryna furthers points out that the Soviet government, at the time, poorly handled the aftermath of the disaster. In fact, the USSR, which perpetrated mass injustices to its citizens, took little to no ownership or responsibility for their implications, according to Petryna. From initial efforts to douse the flames to attempts to enclose the site of the reactor, over 600,000 workers were exposed to radiation in the vicinity surrounding the power plant. Additionally, studies found that even those individuals residing in the extended contaminated areas, on average had five times as much chemical radiation as the citizens outside this zone. From this information, Petryna draws her conclusion that governmental, and other relief organizations should have played a greater role in supporting the affected

Early in the morning of April 27, 1986, the world experienced its largest nuclear disaster ever (Gould 40). While violating safety protocol during a test, Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl power plant was placed in a severely unstable state, and in a matter of seconds the reactor output shot up to 120 times the rated output (Flavin 8). The resulting steam explosion tossed aside the reactor’s 1,000 ton concrete covering and released radioactive particles up to one and a half miles into the sky (Gould 38). The explosion and resulting fires caused 31 immediate deaths and over a thousand injuries, including radiation poisoning (Flavin 5). After the

The Chernobyl accident was a disastrous nuclear event that happened on 26th April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. The Chernobyl disaster is classified as a level 7 event according to the International Nuclear Event Scale (only two events have been classified this high in the past) and has caused damages that consist of the cost of 500,000 workers and 18 billion rubles, 31 deaths according to the Soviet casualty count (this is still being disputed) and between 4000-27000 affected future deaths due to radiation exposure [G1].

The recent nuclear disaster in Japan has resurrected the memories of Chernobyl in the public’s imagination. The 1986 disaster of the Ukrainian reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is still regarded as the worst nuclear disaster in history, although the Japanese crisis is still unfolding. The Chernobyl disaster “was the product of a flawed Soviet reactor design coupled with serious mistakes made by the plant operators. It was a direct consequence of Cold War isolation and the resulting lack of any safety culture” (“Chernobyl,” WNA, 2011). In 1987 an important article appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The author, Roger E. Linnemann, MD, had this to say about the accident:

A big part of the clean up process involved the setting of the sarcophagus. A sarcophagus is a concrete box, usually used for a corpse. In this case the unit 4 of the Chernobyl plant was in a corpse in hoped to be buried for good. Around 7,000 tonnes of steel and 410,000 m3 of concrete were used to cover the reactor. The sarcophagus was designed to halt the release of any radiation being projected into the atmosphere from the reactor. “ The first task in destroying the nuclear reactor was to build a ‘cooling slab’ underneath the reactor to prevent the still-hot reactor fuel from burning a hole in the base of the the reactor” ( Green Peace International ). Two months later, on the 24th of June 400 coal miners had built the 168 meter long tunnel under the reactor. A problem with the sarcophagus is that the lifetime span of the concrete is only 20 to 30 years. With the concrete starting to crack it leads to moisture in the air or rain being able to seep through the cracks into the reactors, then entering the reactor becoming radioactively contaminated seeping into the soil. With this happening, it can lead to the contamination of groundwater and the contamination of lakes and rivers nearby. Scientist predict that the next nuclear catastrophe like Chernobyl, will be Chernobyl itself, due to the fragile status of its protective shield. The next nuclear catastrophe could be even worse than the first one if the sarcophagus is not properly taken care of. No one knows exactly how