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On April 26, 1986, Chernobyl's
Nuclear Power Station number four reactor exploded,
spewing a cloud of radioactive material across a
swath of Europe in the world's worst civilian nuclear
reactor disaster.
Officials estimate that about 30 people were killed
immediately and more than 15,000 people died in
the emergency clean up afterwards. Experts reckon
that radiation equivalent to 500 times that released
by the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima was measured
in the atmosphere around Chernobyl after the 1986
explosion.
Altogether around 3.5 million people, over a third
of them children, are believed to have suffered
illnesses as a result of radioactive contamination.
U.N. figures show that millions in Ukraine, Belarus
and Russia still live on contaminated land.
Soviet officials initially tried to hush up the
tragedy, but the accident became a turning point
in Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev's "Glasnost"
policy of openness. But the real scale of the catastrophe,
which displaced hundreds of thousands of people
and turned villages and towns into ghost communities,
turned out to be far greater.
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