Apr 25
Ukrainian journalist Tatiana Tsymbal covering the Chornobyl nuclear disaster. Ukraine, 1986. X
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Ukrainian journalist Tatiana Tsymbal covering the Chornobyl nuclear disaster. Ukraine, 1986. X
Vehicles of the Radioactive Zone
The radiation made them too dangerous to return to service out of the zone, and so Soviet authorities set up vehicle graveyards for them, including the giant heavy-lift helicopters that had flown over reactor number four's fuming pyre. Two enormous sites were prepared in Rassokha and Buryakovka within the exclusion zone, and the vehicles were flown or driven there – and left to rust in the open air for at least 100 years until the radiation levels fell to normal levels.
A huge armada of vehicles were used to clean-up the radioactive aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster 40 years ago. Many of them still lie rus
On 26 April 1986, the reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, causing the worst nuclear disaster in history.
The explosion occurred during a simulated test, killing 2 engineers and burning 2 others, and resulting in the hospitalization of 237 workers, including 134 with acute radiation poisoning (28 of them would die within the next 3 months). An estimated 9,000 deaths resulted from the radiation over the next decades.
Over 50,000 square miles around the power plant was significantly contaminated (extending into what is now Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine), with radioactivity traced back to the plant from Austria, Bulgaria, Finland, Greece, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and other European countries.
A concrete "sarcophogaus" was built over the plant to contain radiation in the short term, but no other structure was built, and in 2013, a section of the roof collapses, releasing more radiation. A new containment structure was completed in 2016.
During Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a Russian drone hit the structure, damaging it and causing a fire.
40 YEARS AGO TODAY
01:23:45 AM
APRIL 26, 1986
CHERNOBYL, USSR
(CHORNOBYL, UKRAINE)
photo credits:
By IAEA Imagebank - 02790015, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63251598
By Images SPOT acquises dans le cadre du programme Spot World Heritage du CNES - https://regards.cnes.fr/user/swh/modules/58?d=URN%3AAIP%3ADATA%3Aswh%3A0dcd80ce-145b-3b0f-97e5-5da2b521c666%3AV1&eds=PARAMETERS&rt=DATA&t=DESCRIPTION, Licence Ouverte, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=106847626
By atomicallyspeaking on flikr https://www.flickr.com/photos/atomicallyspeaking/
it's Chornobyl not chernobyl btw
Chernobyl is russian transliteration of Ukrainian place so don't use it
Today is a 37st anniversary of the Chornobyl Nuclear Plant disaster. It's hard to talk about one unprocessed national tragedy while living through another.
The Chornobyl disaster was totally preventable and it took away countless lives of people living in the region, especially in Ukraine and Belarus - both the liquidators and the civillians. Despite the very air and dust being literal poison, the soviets had not only hid this information from the people, but forced everybody to partake in the May the 1st parade - because god forbid we lose our face before the international community as a working class paradise! If not for the nuclear scientists in Sweden who raised the alarm about the dangerous levels of nuclear particles coming from northern Ukraine, who knows what would have happened. It definitely would have been swepped under the rug and forgotten by the international community, together with its victims - just like Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan is barely known abroad.
With russia constantly threatening to turn Zaporhizhzha nuclear plant into second Chornobyl, the wound caused by this tragedy is cut open again.
We all love the HBO Chornobyl series, and I genuinely am grateful to Craig Mazin for the amount of empathy and respect he brought to the series; but for today I indulge you to watch something made by ukrainians, to try to understand what this tragedy means to us and how it influences our lives even today.
For the documentaries, my favourite series by this day remains the "Dragons live here" by Your Underground Humanitarian School Youtube channel, which, unfortunately, can only offer automated english subtitles - they should, however, be sufficient.
As for the feature films, I recommend "Gateway" (you can stream it online with english subtitles here). And here is the official english trailer:
Google Drive full of book PDFs about Chernobyl
Link to the Google Drive if you don't want to click the title: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kscKFciW6almJA8p-0sUQPO3c0A4AQYe
Note: It will be updated regularly - for as long as I'll be able to find/get new things =) So far I've compiled 41 books in three languages.
Just to repeat what I said in the first post: I'm open to any requests or suggestions or even PDFs themselves, if someone wants to share theirs from their collection. Message me, send me an ask, throw a rock through my window - whatever you prefer, just please, do it yourself because I'm too scared to message anyone, thanks. No fiction - that's the only rule. Any language is welcome - if you want me to look for a certain book in the language of your choice, I'll do that. If you have a book in language other than English, I'd love to add it to the Drive! If you have a better version of whatever PDF I've already got, then I'd be more than happy to do a swap.
Now, some of my reasoning, if anyone's interested: first of all, I think it's important for everyone to be able to access stuff like this. Think of it as a library, minus the "give these back" part. Secondly, I get soooo mad when people are like haha, found this super rare, basically impossible to find, very expensive book! ...I shall now keep it exclusively to myself. Ma'am, you're ruining the vibe and stalling everyone's hobby research but I guess you do you...
List of all the books (under the cut):