Chernobyl

The Chernobyl accident was a nuclear accident at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin nuclear power plant (3 km from the city of Pripyat, present-day Ukraine) on Saturday, April 26, 1986. Considered, together with the nuclear accident of Fukushima I in Japan in 2011, as the most serious in the International Nuclear Accident Scale (major accident, level 7), is one of the greatest environmental disasters in history.

Basically, it was experimenting with the reactor to check if the energy of the turbines could generate enough electricity for the cooling pumps in case of failure (until the diesel generators started). The amount of uranium dioxide, boron carbide, europium oxide, erbium, extruded zirconium and graphite alloys, 4 radioactive and / or toxic materials, was estimated to be 500 times greater than that released by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, directly caused the death of 31 people and forced the government of the Soviet Union to the sudden evacuation of 116,000 people, causing an international alarm when radioactivity was detected in at least 13 countries in Central and Eastern Europe.

After the accident, a massive process of decontamination, containment and mitigation was initiated by approximately 600,000 people called liquidators in the areas surrounding the accident site and an area of ​​30 km radius was isolated around the plant

Two employees of the plant died as a direct result of the explosion and another 29 died in the following three months. About 1000 people received large doses of radiation during the first day