russian nuclear reactor meltdown in chernobyl

#Russian nuclear reactor meltdown in chernobyl series

Petersburg and dancing with my toy bear and noticing everybody is really sad.” “All I remember,” Antonova adds, “is being in St. “But I do know from my mom’s stories and my dad’s stories that when the May holidays started in the Soviet Union, most people were still not aware that something disastrous had happened.” “I was too young only a couple of years old,” Antonova says. Russian President Vladimir Putin said today the Chernobyl disaster was 'a grave lesson for all of mankind.'' Russians were also directly impacted by Chernobyl. The explosion sent up a cloud of radioactive material that blew into parts of neighbouring Russia and Belarus, and Moscow managed the crisis from the Kremlin.

The world only became aware of the problem when the radiation cloud set off alarms at a reactor in Sweden. The Soviet authorities attempted to suppress news of the meltdown at Chernobyl and were slow to evacuate people from the disaster area. “And as soon as he heard that this was happening,” she says, “they put me on a train to St. “From what I understand, we found out sooner than the general public, but later than a few other officials.” “My grandfather was a general in the Soviet army,” recalls writer and journalist Natalia Antonova. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated. There was a massive leak of radiation, leading to fallout eventually landing all across Europe.ĭozens died in the struggle to contain the disaster.

#Russian nuclear reactor meltdown in chernobyl series

It became the world’s worst peacetime nuclear disaster.Ī power surge during the test led to a rupture and a series of steam explosions. The reactor in Ukraine, in the old Soviet Union, went into meltdown. On April 26, 1986, a routine test on reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant went horribly wrong.