Twenty years ago this month, a routine maintenance test at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine veered wildly out of control.
At 1:23 in the morning on April 26, 1986, there was a disastrous chain reaction in the core of reactor No.4. A power surge ruptured the uranium fuel rods, while a steam explosion created a huge fireball that blew the roof off the reactor. The resulting radioactive plume blanketed the nearby city of Pripyat.[1]
.The memories of survivors were collected for the 10th anniversary of the disaster in the book Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of the Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich. We hear some of their stories: those living with illness and fear, and those sent in to clean up the mess and monitor the damage.
Miners were brought in to dig a tunnel under the reactor to create a space for a heat exchanger, to stop the molten core melting through the concrete pad and contaminating the groundwater, threatening millions of lives
- ^ "'Voices From Chernobyl': Survivors' Stories". NPR.org. Retrieved 2022-07-15.
- ^ "Chernobyl survivors assess fact and fiction in TV series". BBC News. 2019-06-12. Retrieved 2022-07-15.
- ^ author., Aleksievich, Svetlana, 1948-. Voices from Chernobyl. ISBN 978-1-62897-330-3. OCLC 1108873682.
{{cite book}}:|last=has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ author., Aleksievich, Svetlana, 1948-. Voices from Chernobyl. ISBN 978-1-62897-330-3. OCLC 1108873682.
{{cite book}}:|last=has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)