Chernobyl Essay

Chernobyl

1986 was a year of several meaningful worldwide events, some of which included the Voyager 2 got details and pictures of Uranus, the space shuttle Challenger exploded on takeoff, and Haley’s comet soared past Earth (infoplease.com). Perhaps the event that alarmed the world the most, however, was the major nuclear accident that occurred at the nuclear power plant Chernobyl. The nuclear disaster that occurred at Chernobyl in 1986 (Lecture 4/1/02), has forever changed the way that nuclear power plants are viewed by the world.

Chernobyl is now an abandoned city in north Ukraine because at 1:23 am on April 26th (Chernobyl.com), during an “unauthorized test of one of the plant's four reactors, engineers initiated an uncontrolled chain reaction in the core of the reactor after disabling emergency backup systems” (infoplease.com). The type of reactor used at Chernobyl was a graphite-water reactor (Lecture 3/25/02). This means that the moderator of the reactor is graphite, and the coolant is water (Lecture 3/25/02).

Pripyat, Chernobyl, and nearby towns were evacuated. The people of Chernobyl were exposed to radioactivity 100 times greater than that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II (Chernobyl.com). People who lived near the plant in Ukraine and Belarus at the time have recently seen a greatly increased of thyroid cancer, and genetic mutations such as babies being born with “no arms, no eyes, or only stumps for limbs” (Chernobyl.com). Ukraine has estimated that as many as 8,000 people died as a result of the accident and during its cleanup (infoplease.com). It is also estimated that about 47,000 eventual cancer deaths in Europe and Asia may occur in the next 50 years due to the radioactivity of the accident (Kraushaar and Ristinen