Summer on Radio 1

[E*F*4L]

26th April is the Anniversary of Chernobyl, the worlds worst nuclear disaster (so far).

some members on here may not have even been born when the accident happened in 1986 !

this is a brief summery of what happened ;

"On 26 April 1986 01:23:45 a.m. (UTC+3) reactor number four at the Chernobyl plant, near Pripyat in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, exploded. Further explosions and the resulting fire sent a plume of highly radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area. Four hundred times more fallout was released than had been by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima"

more info here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

the exact number of deaths is unlikely to ever be known but a estimated 600,000 people were exposed to radiation & upwards of 4,000 have died due to various cancers, fortunitly there were two reporters on the scene Igor Kostin who took some of the very first photo's of the accident, most of his photos were just black due to the high levels of radiation, the other was Vladimir Shevchenko who took films of the clean up, he died due to the doses of radiation he received whilst filming.

Vladimir Shevchenko film below, at 3:10 it shows miners digging under the core to remove debris so it can be reinforced with concrete to stop the core which is slowly melting it's way down to the bubbler pool which would have caused a even bigger release of radiation three men went into the pool to open sluice gates to let out some of the water

These were engineers Alexei Ananenko (who knew where the valves were) and Valeri Bezpalov, accompanied by a third man, Boris Baranov, who provided them with light from a lamp, though this lamp failed, leaving them to find the valves by feeling their way along a pipe. None of the three ever returned to the surface and it is thought one of them died before reaching the gates.

at 4:12 it shows the bio-robots moving highly radioactive graphite that used to surround the core of the reactor, they did use mechanical robots in the beginning but their electronics were damaged by the radiation, so they sent men up to remove it by hand.

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those people gave their lives to stop a even worse release of radiation into the atmosphere, the effects of which would have been most likely horrifying.

RIP.

im not against nuclear power, but this should never be allowed to happen again, nor forgotten.

[DC]

how awful. this is why they should keep al qaeda away from these type of places, the devestation if things go wrong can be fatal.