The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that happened on April 26, 1986, at the number 4 reactor, which is the heart of the power plant) at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It happened near the city of Pripyat in The USSR (Modern day Ukraine). The accident was the result of a flawed reactor design that was operated by people who weren’t properly trained. The station had four reactors, which were each capable of producing 1,000 megawatts of electric power (1,000 megawatts is the comparison of 1 billion watts which is enough to power about 900,000 homes in the Northeast). A steam explosion and fires released at least 5% of the radioactive reactor core (which acts as a coolant and a moderator to help slow down the neutrons produced by fission) into the environment.

Two of the workers died because of the explosion and 28 people died within a few weeks because of acute radiation syndrome. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation came to the conclusion that apart from some 5,000 thyroid cancers (which caused 15 fatalities), “there [was] no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 20 years after the accident.”

Some 350,000 people were evacuated as a result of what happened. Resettlement of the areas in which people were relocated is ongoing. On March 9th the Chernobyl plant was disconnected from the electricity grid. The IAEA stated that they did not see a critical impact on the safety of people anymore. Between 50 and 185 million curies and radionuclides (radioactivity forms of chemical elements) had escaped into the atmosphere. Many thousands of people were evacuated but hundreds of thousands of people remained in the contaminated areas. Also in the years after there were many livestock that was born deformed. 

Today it is seen as uninhabitable. Pripyat is a ghost town with apartment buildings, shops, hospitals, and restaurants forever trapped in time due to the disaster. It is slowly becoming more inhabitable with many flora and fauna inhabiting the radioactive city and some showing little to no forms of radiation poisoning. However, it’s still nowhere near inhabitable to humans as the radiation scale has been recorded to have increased in radiation last February.