Chernobyl

Near a small town called Pripyat, in what is now Ukraine, there was a big power station called Chernobyl. It made electricity for homes and factories. Pripyat was a new, clean town. Many young families lived there. Most of them worked at the power station.

On the night of 25 April 1986, the workers wanted to do a test on Reactor No. 4. To do the test, they had to make the reactor run very slowly. But this reactor was dangerous when it ran slowly, and the workers did not know this. They also turned off some safety systems.

Then, just after one o'clock in the morning, something went wrong. The power went up very fast — too fast to stop. A worker pushed the emergency button to shut the reactor down. But this reactor had a bad design, and the button made everything worse.

There were two big explosions. The top of the reactor was blown off, and the roof was open to the sky. Now the hot, broken reactor sent radiation straight into the air. Firefighters came quickly. They saw the fire, but they could not see the radiation all around them. It was invisible. Many of them became very ill, and 28 workers and firefighters died in the next few weeks.

But in Pripyat, life went on as normal at first. Children went to school. People hung their washing outside, in air that was already poisoned. For a day and a half, the leaders said almost nothing. Then, about 36 hours after the explosion, the buses came. The 47,000 people of Pripyat were told to pack one small bag for "a few days." But they never came back. Today, Pripyat is an empty town: silent flats, a broken fairground, and a swimming pool with no water.

The Soviet government did not tell other countries about the accident. But two days later, on 28 April, alarms started to ring at a power station in Sweden, more than a thousand kilometres away. The workers there checked their own reactor. It was fine. The radiation was coming on the wind, from the east. Now Sweden asked questions, and the government in Moscow could not stay silent. That evening, it finally said that there had been an accident at Chernobyl.

The clean-up was huge. Hundreds of thousands of workers — soldiers, miners and volunteers — were sent to the area. They buried poisoned soil, washed the streets, and built a big concrete cover over the broken reactor. A large area around the power station was closed off, and people are still not allowed to live there today. People say that the danger to the workers was hidden, and the true number of people who got ill is still not clear. Above all, people lost their trust in the government, because it had hidden a disaster from its own people. Many people say that Chernobyl was one reason the Soviet Union later fell apart.