Extract from ABC News
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened 40 years ago today in what is now northern Ukraine. (Reuters: Vasily Fedosenko)
In northern Ukraine, about 100 kilometres from Kyiv, lies a strange and abandoned landscape. Villages and towns are almost empty; kindergartens, once alive with children's voices, are silent. Buildings are being reclaimed by vegetation. Wild animals roam empty streets.
But it is not war with Russia that has led to this.
At 1.23am on April 26, 1986 an explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant outside the town of Pripyat became the worst nuclear disaster in history.
Dolls, which were placed by a visitor, lie on beds at a kindergarten in the abandoned city of Pripyat near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. (Reuters: Gleb Garanich)
The nuclear power plant opened in 1977 and the nearby town of Pripyat was built to house thousands of workers and their families. The plant, with four reactors, was celebrated as a triumph of Soviet engineering and energy planning.
Less than a decade later, the explosion led to a tragedy that lingers 40 years on. The Soviet leader at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev, has claimed it to be so significant the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl underpinned the collapse of the Soviet Union even more profoundly than his Glasnost and Perestroika political reforms.
A picture of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin as seen through wild flowers inside a hospital in the abandoned town of Pripyat. (Reuters)
Dozens of employees died when reactor 4 exploded — caused when a power surge and a build-up of steam blew it apart. But there was more tragedy to come.
In the days that followed thousands more became ill with acute radiation poisoning, reporting nosebleeds, dizziness and nausea as radioactive material including iodine-131, caesium-137, strontium-90, xenon gas and plutonium — with half a half-life of thousands of years — was released into the atmosphere.
Anyone inside the reactor at the time of the explosion would have received an annual safe dose of radiation in under a minute. Plumes of radioactive smoke spread across Europe.
As many as 600,000 "liquidators" — teams of workers sent in to clean up the mess — were among those exposed.
No one knows how many have died as a result of the explosion at the nuclear facility 40 years ago. Doctors suspect thousands of premature cancer deaths can be tracked to the nuclear meltdown and the release of radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere.
As radiation spread across Europe those at risk were offered an anti-radiation iodine solution. (Reuters)
In the days following the disaster more than 115,000 people were evacuated from their homes in Ukraine. Many were told they would be gone only a few days. Yet most have never returned.
Some estimates suggest the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, or Zone of Alienation — a 2,600 square kilometre swath of Ukrainian territory bordering Belarus — will be radioactive for millions of years. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,110 years. Uranium-235, an astonishing 704 million years.
Ghost villages, abandoned after the explosion, now surround the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. (Upsplash)
'Everything was humming'
April 26, 1986, was Iryna Statsenko's wedding day. She remembers waking in the middle of the night to a "rumble" that sounded as if planes were flying overhead.
"Everything was humming and the glass in the windows shook," she told the BBC.
Iryna's fiance, Serhiy Lobanov, was sleeping on a mattress on the kitchen floor of his family's apartment nearby: the bedrooms were filled with wedding guests.
He remembers "a shake, as if some kind of wave passed", before falling back to sleep.
When their wedding day dawned radiation from the stricken plant could not be contained. But the Soviet authorities were silent.
Iryna and Serhiy saw soldiers in gas masks washing the streets with a foamy solution. The market was deserted. Neighbours whispered, something "terrible" has happened.
But Soviet authorities insisted there was nothing to fear and things should carry on as normal. Information was impossible to find.
Iryna and Serhiy's wedding went ahead. But it felt "sad", the couple says now, with the weight of this unspoken doom. The wedding dance was a disaster: "From the first steps we went out of rhythm", Iryna remembers. "We just hugged each other and moved in the hug."
At 10am on April 27, still without a formal acknowledgement from the government, helicopters began ferrying sand, clay, lead, boron and dolomite and dumping it into the burning core of the reactor in a futile attempt to slow the release of radioactivity.
A few days later Sergei Belyakov, an assistant professor at the Ukrainian State Chemical Technical University, was fishing on the Dnieper River when he noticed that the water level was dropping. He knew it was a sign that an industrial accident had occurred further upstream. Water from the river was being pumped out of the river.
A news broadcast mentioning a few casualties from an accident at the nuclear power plant. The broadcast said everything had been "taken care of", Sergei remembers.
Behind the scenes, extraordinary efforts were being made to keep the extent of the explosion secret.
As the days passed it became impossible to contain the rumours. Information began to leak. The Soviet leadership switched tack: instead of a cover-up officials used propaganda to entice citizens to volunteer for the clean-up emphasising this was a time for national pride. They would be paid handsomely.
Sergei was proud of his skills as a military chemist. He believed he would be of help and spent several weeks volunteering as a "bio-robot liquidator". He earned five times his monthly salary. Decades later, he says the health impact of those weeks remain with him.
Spy satellites unravelled the mystery
By April 28 air monitors in Sweden had picked up large quantities of radiation in the atmosphere and tracked it back to the USSR.
The following day Western spy satellites captured photographs of the devastation. Soviet officials finally publicly admitted they had a problem.
Attempts to reduce the risk of radiation spread continued: liquid nitrogen was pumped below the reactor to cool it, contaminated villages were bulldozed, radioactive pets and livestock were shot, contaminated topsoil was buried.
By early May the fire in the reactor's core had burnt itself out but in Kyiv, schools closed, residents were told to stay indoors and leafy vegetables were off the menu.
On May 14, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev spoke about the accident for the first time, reassuring citizens that "the worst is behind us".
A few days later construction began on a huge concrete sarcophagus to cover the ruins of reactor 4, marking the start of a 100-year process to decommission the reactor and contain its lethal remains.
The sarcophagus covering the damaged fourth reactor seen from a building in the abandoned town of Pripyat. (Reuters: Gleb Garanich)
But despite the danger, the Soviet Union could not just abandon the Chernobyl power plant. Apart from regularly monitoring radiation levels, scientists and engineers continued to operate reactors 1, 2 and 3.
Workers wore protective clothing, committed to decontamination, limited work hours to reduce exposure and regular medical checks. While the original worker's town of Pripyat was abandoned, a new town — Slavutych — was built 30 kilometres away on the edge of the exclusion zone.
A Ukrainian police officer working inside the 30km exclusion zone receives a medical examination. (Reuters)
Then, in 2020, reactor 3 was closed. It was the last of Chernobyl's nuclear plants to be decommissioned and an era of wider decontamination and decommissioning of the site began.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Russian soldiers briefly took control of this strategically important area, lying between Russia's ally Belarus and Ukraine's capital, Kyiv. A fire broke out and there were concerns it could reach the power plant, creating a new nuclear disaster.
But by the end of March, the soldiers were gone. The dangerous and deserted region was back in Ukrainian hands.
Remnants of abandoned Pripyat's once-thriving town are being reclaimed by nature. (Reuters: Gleb Garanich )
Ghost villages wrestle with nature
Forty years after the explosion the Zone of Alienation is scattered with ghost villages. The town of Chernobyl, transliterated as Chornobyl in Ukrainian, once buzzed with 14,000 residents. Nearby Pripyat, the town founded in 1970 to house nuclear plant workers and their families, was home to 45,000 people.
Shoes and a gas mask for children are left in a kindergarten in Ukraine's ghost town of Pripyat where 45,000 used to live. (Reuters: Gleb Garanich)
But alongside this bleak legacy an astounding transformation is unfolding.
About one or two hundred people, mostly elderly women, continue to live in the Zone of Alienation. They are known as Samosely, self-settlers, and refused to leave their homes inside the radioactive "forbidden zone". Others are moving to the edges of the exclusion zone where a crumbling house can be bought for a few hundred dollars.
A few hundred self-settlers refused to leave their homes inside the radioactive "forbidden zone". (Reuters: Vasily Fedosenko)
Living alongside the Samosely "babushkas", a rotating staff of up to 3,000 scientists work shifts to monitor contamination and manage what remains of the power plant.
Under the shadow of radioactive contamination, pockets of habitation and vast emptiness, an experiment on what happens when humans disappear from a landscape is underway. Chernobyl's Zone of Alienation has been reclaimed by nature, described as "the most picturesque nature reserve on Earth".
When humans disappeared from the landscape, wildlife returned.
The region is home to packs of wild horses, dogs, wolves and more. After decades of absence, brown bears have returned to live alongside lynx, red deer and moose. Most intriguing is the population of Mongolian "spirit" horses that have established themselves in the zone after being introduced as an experiment in 1998.
Przewalski's horses have thrived since being introduced to the area from Mongolia. (Reuters: Gleb Garanich)
Flora and fauna has literally evolved into something completely new in the years since the explosion as it adapts to toxic new conditions — and the absence of humans.
One of the most curious transformations is organisms turning black, an adaptation scientists believe is caused by a rise in melanin that helps to manage high levels of ionising radiation.
A strange black fungus has been found thriving on the walls inside some of Chernobyl's most radioactive structures.
40 years on, wildlife is thriving in Chernobyl
Scientists have discovered that the fungus Cladosporium sphaerospermum is not harmed by ionising radiation in the same way as other organisms are affected. Not only that but C sphaerospermum grew better when exposed.
A similar change has been found among green tree frogs that have evolved dark green and even black skins in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Even wolves in the region have quickly adapted through natural selection with studies suggesting key genes associated with cancer have mutated to create a "biological shield".
A wild dog at home in the abandoned city of Pripyat.
Princeton University evolutionary biologist Cara Love has discovered that wolves in the zone receive six times the daily safe limit of radiation for the average human. Similar to a patient undergoing radiation for cancer, the wolves have evolved an altered immune system and changes to elements of their genetic code that resists cancer.
They now roam the region in numbers not seen for 100 years.
Despite radiation, wildlife in and around the exclusion zone has been teeming since people left and some continue to hunt the animals. ( Reuters: Vasily Fedosenko)
Lessons from Chernobyl
In the decades since the nuclear disaster, only the damage to Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami comes close in scale to Chernobyl. It is the only other nuclear accident rated 7 (Major Accident) on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale.
A woman lights a lantern to commemorate those killed in the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan in 2011. (Reuters: Yuriko Nakao)
Some argue Fukushima's global contamination was worse because the coastal location of the plant allowed radioactive waste to flow directly into the Pacific Ocean and travel around the world.
It can be tempting to look at the way nature, and some small human communities, have thrived in Chernobyl's Zone of Alienation and conclude that we have little to fear from nuclear disaster.
But experts warn although the absence of humans and rewilding of the region has allowed animals to breed in large numbers, they are often unhealthy. Individual animals continue to experience high rates of cancer as well as smaller brains, cataracts and other genetic mutations.
And the number of humans who have died early from cancer induced by radiation exposure is almost impossible to know for sure.
Humans generally have more complex health systems than animals and their longer lives gives greater opportunity for the impact of radiation to take affect.
Liquidators or emergency workers, who fought the blaze at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, have demonstrated against cuts to their subsidies and benefits. This man's bandage reads "I am starving". (Reuters: Valeriy Bilokryl )
The Chernobyl explosion has a social legacy too.
Hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted from their homes, never to return. The "liquidators" who cleaned up the disaster have lived with trauma and health problems, more recently demonstrating against cuts to their benefits and compensation.
A woman wipes tears while holding a portrait of her relative, a victim of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, as she visits a cemetery in Kiev. (Reuters: Konstantin Chernichkin )
While the most dangerous areas remain inaccessible, the risk has not disappeared. The forest that has reclaimed the land is still highly radioactive. If it were to burn, toxic smoke and ash could spread far beyond the exclusion zone.
Drone surveys of the Red Forest — named for the trees that turned a rusted red in the days after the explosion — show radiation levels remain extreme. In some areas, a person could receive a year’s recommended dose of radiation in less than an hour.
A cross with a crucifix stands next to a radiation warning sign near the Chernobyl power plant. (Reuters: Gleb Garanich)
The explosion lasted only minutes but the damage remains in the landscape and in the uncertainty that surrounds its long-term human toll.
Nearly four decades on, the scale of that toll is still unfolding.
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