What happened in Chernobyl, how did the accident happen and how many people died?

April 26, 1986: One of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explodes, the core melts, and the first nuclear accident in history begins. Let’s see how it happened, how many people died and its consequences. What happened in Chernobyl, how the accident occurred and how many people died? From that date, humanity discovered a new name to define a nuclear catastrophe: Chernobyl. What happened in this industrial city in northern Ukraine has been told many times, but in case you don’t know it, you should know that some risky maneuvers during a night drill at the security facilities of the nuclear power plant cause the core to melt, the explosion of the “Reactor 4” and the collapse of the nuclear power plant and the entire structure that protected it. The explosion of the reactor caused a cloud full of radioactive particles five hundred times more deadly than that produced by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. Winds scattered the particles into the atmosphere and entire regions of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were soon polluted. The cloud then reaches much of Western Europe, which also became contaminated (albeit to a lesser extent). At first the authorities tried to hide what happened, but after a few days the truth emerges in all their drama.The nuclear accident in Chernoby is a grade 7 event, the most serious on the INES scale, which gives a number to the criticality of civil nuclear power, so far only equaled by the Fukushima accident on March 11, 2011.How the nuclear disaster was tried to stop The army mobilized, the inhabitants of the city were loaded into buses and trucks and evacuated en masse, while teams of thousands of workers and technicians, later called liquidators and bio-bots, were dispatched for the first desperate interventions to contain the radioactive leak. As we say, they will be called “biorobots” and they are the heroes of Chernobyl since to hurry they came to work near the core of the explosion, even without adequate protection, knowing that in this way they would die in a short time from exposure to a high degree radiation. Many of them ended up dying of tumors and leukemia within a few weeks or months. Others saw the dire consequences of their sacrifice manifested in their children. Thanks to them, the reactor is closed in a reinforced concrete sarcophagus that imprisons the radioactive materials and that was recently replaced by a safer one.The environmental consequences The Chernobyl disaster released a very high amount of radiation, at least 100 times more than the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The area around Chernobyl was abandoned by more than 350,000 people, but millions of inhabitants decided not to evacuate. Among the most serious effects on the environment, the consequences of which are still being felt today, was the contamination of the soil with two strongly radioactive materials. , including cesium-137. The pines of a forest located near the plant acquired a reddish brown color before dying, so much so that the place, today among the most radioactive in the world, is called the ‘red forest’.Following the accident, traces of radioactive material were found throughout the planet’s northern hemisphere, settling in locations depending on the direction of the wind and rain.The health consequences Determining how many people were injured or died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster is extremely hard. The ‘official’ deaths, which are those caused directly by the explosion, were more or less thirty: mostly firefighters and plant workers who, without knowing exactly what was happening, were exposed to radiation doses infinitely higher than those. considered safe. All of these men died within a few weeks or months, suffering excruciatingly. Their extremely radioactive bodies were buried in coffins made of zinc. Much more serious were the indirect consequences. The radiation caused a sharp increase in thyroid cancer cases in locals, particularly in people who were of developing age at the time of the disaster. Other, more indirect effects of the disaster were economic and psychological in nature. The most worrying estimates speak of tens or even hundreds of thousands of cancer deaths due to Chernobyl, and destined to continue for many decades to come. On the other hand, it is difficult to say what the statistics were for cancer in the most critical areas before the disaster, also considering that cancer is a disease that sometimes develops slowly, and it is often difficult to establish the precise causes. Despite these difficulties, it is certain that Chernobyl caused serious damage to land and water, and seriously affected the health of thousands of people.