-Towsif Chowdhury
Pripyat, Ukraine was not always a dilapidated ghost town that modern-day enthusiasts of Soviet culture, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. players, and Soviet-wave fans idolize them as their ultimate travel destination. The ruins of a once-great Soviet ‘closed city’ (the word Soviet will probably be used in almost every sentence of this article) - a city made and designed to serve the nearby nuclear power plant, named after the infamous communist leader, revolutionary, and mass-murderer, Vladimir Lenin, is located in Kyiv Oblast near the Belarus-Ukraine border. The individual after whom the nuclear power plant was named might have been sinister, but the purpose that the power plant served was rather noble, at least for erratic soviet dictators - generating electricity for the general populace of the Soviet Union. Only chosen individuals and professionals who excelled in their work – military personnel, nuclear researchers and workers, scientists and teachers from all across the 15 SSRs (Soviet Socialist Republics) of the Union were the inhabitants of this city and it was deemed to be an accomplishment to be living in Pripyat since it was one of the 42 cities which held special political or military significance for the Soviet regime. As a result, Pripyat was a city equipped with the best amenities the Soviets had to offer their dignified citizens; fully stocked supermarkets, hospitals with proper medical equipment, heated swimming pools which were envied by citizens of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and it eventually became a hub for people of all nationalities of the Union as people from Siberia to East Germany would move here on Soviet command. Everyone living in this city of 49,000 irrespective of their occupation, in one way or another, was contributing to the operational activities of the Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin Nuclear Power Plant. The power plant was the first of its kind to operate on Ukrainian soil and the third most important nuclear power plant for the Soviets. At the height of its operation, the power plant, officially known as the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) was able to generate 4,000 megawatts (MW) of electric power, through its four RBMK-100 reactors, a special class of nuclear power reactors that were the first of their kind to use nuclear graphite as their stabilizers during nuclear fission. However, one of these reactors would one day contribute to proving that a communist utopia like Pripyat is simply an illusion that is broken eventually. During Chernobyl’s heyday, the power generated by it alone produced 10% of the electricity of the then Ukrainian SSR. As they say, good things are not meant to last for too long. At exactly 1:23 AM on April 26th, 1986 it became the site of the largest nuclear disaster mankind had ever witnessed as its reactor-4 quite literally exploded and released more nuclear material into the atmosphere than both of the nuclear bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by Allied Forces during the 2nd World War ever did, combined. It is a pity that the average person is still not aware of the magnitude of horrors Chernobyl caused. Historians suggest that this nuclear accident was the foundation of the gradual collapse of the Soviet Union on 6th December, 1991. One of the greatest ironies of the Chernobyl disaster is that it was caused by a safety test. On the night of April 25th, 1986, a group of engineers was assigned to head to the control room and find out if the newly built reactor-4 could operate its emergency water pumps in the case of a power failure. Therefore this particular reactor was disconnected from all fail-safes and shut off from the main power source. All hell broke loose as a nuclear surge was felt as soon as the engineers ejected all of the 200 control rods from the reactor. In a state of panic, the engineers then started to reinstall the control rods all at once; this was an awful idea. It is understood that the control rods contained the graphite which was used during nuclear fission to stabilize the unstable nuclear reactions inside the reactor.
During the time the control rods were not in the reactor, these irregular reactions were already taking place, and no sooner had the rods been inserted, the reactor was hit with the mother of all explosions; the 1,200 ton cover of the reactor was blasted into the air and radioactive debris shot a kilometer into the night sky. Casualties were inevitable as two workers accompanying the engineers in the control room were killed almost instantly. The explosion emitted such astronomical levels of nuclear radiation that the Geiger-counters (a device used to detect radiation exposure) the surviving engineers were equipped with, stopped working. Back in Pripyat, witnessing the explosion, a poorly equipped fire brigade of 30 men was dispatched with no protective clothing and they started extinguishing the raging flames with water. The fire would not go out and the firemen started complaining that they had a metallic taste on their tongues and felt that pins and needles were being pierced through their faces. By the time these initial responders went home at the end of their shifts; they were showing symptoms of acute radiation sickness (ARS) and yet no state of emergency was declared. On the contrary, at 5 AM, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev was briefed about the situation in a calm manner, and officers from the Nuclear Department claimed that the reactor-4 was so safe that it could be placed right next to the Kremlin with no fear. In reality, by this stage, ruins of reactor-4 were buried under 14 tons of highly radioactive rubble and burning at 3000oC spreading its radiation to the entirety of Northern Ukraine and Southern Belarus. Pripyat was experiencing a sudden increase in temperature that night and concerned parents opened their windows so that their children could sleep in peace. Little did they know, the cancer-causing radioactive particles were now blowing into their bedrooms and settling on them and their children’s bodies! Surprisingly, the next day was an ordinary day in Pripyat as most people knew something had happened at the power plant but they did not bother to know about the extent of what had happened. The men went off to work, women went to purchase daily groceries and children went outside to play. However, the entire situation took an absolute nosedive when masked soldiers were deployed to monitor the populace. The citizens of Pripyat were still unaware of the situation as the soldiers avoided answering any questions. Pockets of crowds started to realize the nuclear tsunami that had occurred upon the arrival of the soldiers. By the evening of April 26th, radiation levels were 600,000 times higher than normal. Anyone exposed to those levels of radiation is likely to die of radiation poisoning in just four days. This made the Soviet regime quit playing around and start taking due action. On 2 PM of April 27th when the deadly fire of reactor-4 was burning approximately three kilometers away from Pripyat, a thousand school buses were driven into the city and parked on every street. Announcements were made by officers calling the citizens of Pripyat to pack their belongings within two hours and to evacuate. The residents only carried their essentials as all 49,000 of them were loaded onto the buses and driven away. None of these people would ever see their homes again. Meanwhile, the high-ranking Soviets in Moscow were trying their best to cover up the incident and save themselves from international embarrassment but it was too late. By 28th April, the radiation had spread so far up north that Swedish authorities who were monitoring their power plants detected these deadly nuclear emissions and from this point on Chernobyl became a global nuclear emergency. Additionally, dangerous readings were coming all the way from Greece and France. On 29th April, the Soviet regime decided to come clean about the incident. The first responders of the incident were now transported to Moscow’s Hospital-6 to cure their acute radiation sickness (ARS). 28 of the 30 firemen died in agony as their skin burned from their bones. This led the Soviets to evacuate 130,000 citizens residing in the nearby towns and villages of Pripyat. By this point, the meltdown of the reactor-4 was contained with sand but the reactor continued to burn. On the other side of the world, the International Agency of Atomic Energy made the most worrying declaration of all; according to their estimates, the reactor was now melting downwards towards the plants and Chernobyl was on the brink of complete nuclear annihilation.
This is because the water that the first, then dead firemen had dumped into the reactor had pooled at the bottom, and with the top of the destroyed reactor now filled with sand, any radioactive molten goo that reached the water could trigger a chain reaction which in turn could trigger a nuclear explosion which would cause all of the remaining reactors to blow up and the extent of this explosion would be 200 times the magnitude of the Hiroshima bombing. This is when the Liquidators were dispatched, brave men and women who marched into jaws of death itself for their duty, and this included army reservists, firemen, nurses, policemen, miners, pilots, scientists, and workers from all of the SSRs. Their tale is one of heroism and suffering, people who in the bleak days of mid-1986 gave their lives up in Chernobyl to protect their Soviet brethren from the horror and second explosion. They drained the water out of the reactor-4, covered the reactor with lead, created a concrete chamber to stop the radioactive poisoning of groundwater, destroyed radioactive debris and on top of that they worked in 40-second shifts otherwise, they risked getting killed. Today a third of the surviving Liquidators are disabled in some form due to nuclear contamination. They are now considered the greatest heroes of the Soviet Union after the war veterans who defeated the Nazis at Stalingrad in World War 2. After the Liquidators, the cleanup crew was called who set a 30-mile exclusion zone around Pripyat and bulldozed and destroyed entire forests and villages which were contaminated in the zone. Special armed squads were formed in this crew to head to the countryside in the zone to kill whatever wildlife they laid their eyes upon since the radioactivity would mutate the wildlife and it could possess a threat to mankind. This is the largest cleanup operation in the history of mankind and this exclusion zone still exists to this very day. Finally at the very end of 1986 when the first snow fell on Pripyat, the Soviets erected the ‘Sarcophagus’, a massive steel and concrete structure built in a hurry which sealed reactor-4 from the outside world completely ensuring that it would remain safe for at least the next 30 years i.e. until 2016. This was not seen as a problem as the Soviets did not predict the downfall of their communist union in the next five years. On November 9th, 1989, the entire world cheered on as the Berlin Wall collapsed uniting East and West Germany and this was the last nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union. The SSRs started to walk away from the USSR and form their own independent states. Protestors walked out wearing gas masks in Kyiv, Ukraine in support of independence signifying the Chernobyl disaster that the Soviets caused and then Ukraine became an independent state on 24th August, 1991. After independence, it became clear as day that Ukraine would never be able to rebuild the ‘Sarcophagus’ when it would finally fall. However, thanks to Ukraine’s post-independence economic boom in the mid-2000s, the government in Kyiv was able to build the massive second ‘Sarcophagus’, an engineering wonder which would contain the old one. It was built 300 meters away from reactor-4, weighed in at a staggering 35,000 tons, and had cost 1.5 billion dollars. The construction took 10 years and it is larger than an Olympic Stadium and taller than the Statue of Liberty. This one is expected to last for the next 100 years from the end of its construction in 2016 i.e. in 2116. There are plans of assigning robots inside the second enclosure once technology has advanced up to that level to finally dismantle reactor-4 for making it safe.
Ukraine has closed all nuclear operations of Chernobyl since 2001 despite the other three reactors remaining operational due to international scrutiny and is still in the process of decommissioning in 2021. The death toll of the disaster might not have been as excessive as Hiroshima or Nagasaki but the impact was so drastic that it is still felt today. It is estimated that 50 people died as an immediate effect and a further 4,000 died for acute radiation sickness (ARS) the disaster brought forth. The legacy that the power plant leaves humanity with is rather twisted; it is a tale of suffering, pain, and agony but at the same time a tale of engineering marvel and joy of the bygone Soviet era. Tourism is now allowed in Pripyat by the Ukrainian government but the area shall be uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years. To experience this old-world charm, tens of thousands of tourists flock to Pripyat and travel in the exclusion zone. It is now even possible to visit the very control room from where the devastating decision was taken which led to the accident wearing protective gear. If opportunity knocks on the door to visit Pripyat, this writer is sure as hell not missing it!
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