Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

by Adam Higginbotham

By the morning of Tuesday, April 29, the work of Antoshkin’s crews seemed to be having an effect: radioactivity escaping from the reactor began to fall, and the temperature dropped from more than 1,000 degrees to 500 degrees centigrade. But radiation levels in the deserted streets of Pripyat had now become so dangerous that the government commission was forced to withdraw to a new headquarters nineteen kilometers away in Chernobyl town. The territory immediately surrounding the plant—an area roughly one and a half kilometers in diameter, which officials soon began calling the osobaya zona, or Special Zone—was highly contaminated with both debris and nuclear fallout. Scientists, specialists, and those operators who had stayed behind to tend to the needs of the remaining three reactors at the station now approached it only in armored personnel carriers.