chernobyl

Twenty years ago today, the worst nuclear reactor disaster in history occurred in Chernobyl, Ukraine. An explosion ripped the top off the containment building, expelling radioactive material into the atmosphere; more was released in the subsequent fire. Only after Swedish instruments detected fallout from the explosion did Soviet authorities admit that an accident had occurred. The reactor core was sealed off by air-dropping a cement mixture, but not before eight tons of radioactive material had escaped, releasing over four hundred times more radiation than the atomic bomb of Hiroshima.

Click here to view the chilling photo essay Nuclear Nightmares: Twenty Years Since Chernobyl.

Click here to read the Wikipedia article about the disaster.

mc