Inside the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 40 years on: ‘We’ll be lucky to be alive tomorrow’

Dogs passing by a Ferris wheel in the ghost town of Pripyat near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (Picture: AFP)

On April 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear accident happened at the Chernobyl plant near Pripyat, Ukraine, then controlled by Soviet Russia.

It was an incident so catastrophic that even the usually tight-lipped Soviet state admitted that a public ‘disaster’ had happened.

The accident spread a cloud of radioactive material across Russia, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, twisting generations of people’s genes, infecting the environment and forcing the world to rethink nuclear power.

What caused the Chernobyl accident?

Chernobyl is 62 miles north of the capital Kyiv (Picture: Gamma-Rapho)

All the plant operators wanted to do that day was check if the facility could stay ticking for 40 seconds, 45 tops, without power.

However, testers at Reactor No 4 switched off almost all safety features before carrying out the emergency shutdown test.

So what did this mean?

Nuclear power plants generate electricity by splitting atoms to create intense heat, known as radiation. This heat boils water into steam, which spins turbines to produce power.

Crucially, during the test, workers switched off the steam – but without it, the reactor’s cooling systems malfunctioned. Operators tried to reinsert control rods to slow the reaction but a flaw in them caused them to jam. 

The sudden power surge caused steam explosions that destroyed the core and ignited a graphite fire that burned for days.

German officials screening people after the disaster (Picture: Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images)

The meltdown contaminated the area with a hundred times more radiation than that released by the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Inspectors wrote in a report that the accident was ’caused by a remarkable range of human errors and violations of operating rules’.

Vince Zabielski, a former nuclear engineer, says that as much as staff were to blame, so was the Soviet-era reactor’s dodgy design, called the RBMK.

‘Unlike Western reactors, there was no containment structure to limit the release,’ the partner at international law firm Pillsbury tells Metro. ‘Its scale, severity, and enduring impact set it apart from all other nuclear accidents.

‘As a condition of entry into the EU, all countries using the RBMK design had to permanently cease operations.’

How many people died?

Two plant workers were killed within hours of the meltdown. Another 28 people died from radiation poisoning, including firefighters at the scene.

Anatoli Zakharov, a surviving firefighter, told The Observer: ‘I remember joking to the others, “There must be an incredible amount of radiation here. We’ll be lucky if we’re all still alive in the morning”.’

But radiation can also slowly kill. Thousands or possibly millions have died from radiation-associated illnesses, including children.

Pripyat is abandoned (Picture: 2023 Pacific Press/Getty Images) The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone stretches 1,000 square miles (Picture: Danylo Dubchak/Frontliner)

Petro Hurin, a ‘liquidator’ – someone tasked with cleaning up the reactor – told Reuters that five of the 40 people in his team are alive today.

‘Not a single Chernobyl person is in good health,’ Hurin, 76, said. ‘It’s death by a thousand cuts.’

Ionising radiation, the energy emitted by atomic reactions, can singe living tissue and tear the strands in our DNA. Even a low dose can cause cancer and other long-term physical problems.

It’s thought that around 4,000 – 6,000 of thyroid cancer cases, mostly in children, can be directly linked to the disaster, however, Dr Thom Davies, associate geography professor at the University of Nottingham, think we may never know the true toll, in terms of fatalities and ongoing health implications.

‘One reason Chernobyl was so devastating was the sheer scale of the disaster – larger than any other toxic accident in human history’ he tells Metro.

‘This radioactive material spread silently and invisibly across much of Europe, including the UK, transforming areas near the reactor into what I call “toxic geographies”: landscapes still contaminated decades later.

The site is one of the most toxic places on Earth (Picture: Anadolu) The blast showered the surrounding area with radioactive particles, many still lingering today (Picture: AFP)

‘What makes radiation frightening is its invisibility. You cannot see it, hear it, or smell it – yet it has the power to cause illness, displacement and death.’

Do people still live in Chernobyl?

Some locals disobeyed orders to evacuate (Picture: Hulton Archive)

It took 36 hours for Pripyat, a town of nearly 50,000, to be evacuated following the blast.

The delay came in part because Soviet officials did not tell residents the true extent of the meltdown, instead just shoving them onto buses.

Doctors were forbidden from diagnosing people with radiation sickness, shrugging their pain off as nervous conditions.

It took a Swedish monitoring station 800 miles away picking up on high levels of radiation for the Kremlin to admit something terrible had happened.

In the years following, the government ousted 350,000 locals, making them ‘nuclear refugees’, says Dr Davies.

‘To put that into perspective, this is roughly equivalent to uprooting the entire population of Iceland or the Maldives and telling them they could never return home,’ he adds.

Chernobyl now

The disaster site, now called the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, stretches 1,000 square miles.

Though radiation levels have declined somewhat through decay, the area remains largely empty. 

Around 150 survivors live on the outskirts, many women in their 80s who call themselves samosely, or ‘self-settlers’.

Among them is Yevhen, who was a 49-year-old teacher at the time of the accident. He returned only a decade later to work in radiation protection.

‘Did we survive? We did! Did anyone get sick? No one! Did anyone die of radiation? No one,’ he told the Ukraїner.

‘If I hadn’t returned immediately, I would have kicked the bucket. I want to live in Chernobyl, nowhere else.’

In the aftermath, officials built a ramshackle shelter around the reactor to contain radioactive dust, called the sarcophagus. It has been encased by a 40,000 steel shell, the New Safe Confinement, since 2016.

After the area was declared safe for limited visitation, tourists became a common sight for over a decade, with 120,000 visiting in 2019 alone, following the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, which aired that same year.

While the Russia-Ukraine war led to a decrease in numbers, travel firms still offer tours for as little as £25.

After travelling to the city by car, people are shown decaying churches, rusted ships and road signs pointing to the abandoned villages.

They stress that, no, you don’t need to pack your own Geiger counter.

‘Expecting silence, ghost streets and an empty atmosphere? Not at all, you are about to see the real living face of Chernobyl today in just one hour,’ one tour, offered by Chernobyl X, claims.

One of the company’s excursions sees daytrippers ride Soviet-era vehicles, wear ‘liquidators costumes’ and have a ‘Cher-noble’ time.

The wild side of Chernobyl

With so few humans, the area has turned into a post-apocalyptic nature haven.

Wolves, horses and the descendants of abandoned pet dogs roam around crumbling apartment blocks and rusted amusement park rides.

Scientists consider the zone a lab to see how chronic, low-level radiation impacts the animals.

Despite being exposed to such high levels of radiation, wolves have grown more resilient to cancer because of a genetic mutation – the exact opposite effect seen in humans – while frogs have darker skin to protect against the invisible heat.

Zabielski

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