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March 15 - March 18, 2022
shove them through the door one at a time.
As he leaned out over the reactor, he was enveloped in clouds of toxic gas and blasted by waves of gamma and neutron radiation.
everyone from Pripyat to be distributed throughout the small towns and villages of rural Polesia, where they would be taken in—one family at a time—by farmers and kolkhoz workers.
Within twenty-four hours, it had reached Scandinavia.
around the city of Gävle, two hours’ drive north of Stockholm, it had become heavily radioactive.
Not one word about Chernobyl had appeared in the Soviet press or been reported on radio or television.
On Saturday, after instruments at the Kiev Institute of Botany registered a sharp increase in radiation, KGB officers arrived and sealed the devices “to avoid panic and the spreading of provocative rumors.”
April 29, the press in Moscow remained entirely silent about the accident.
assured the public that they were not in danger, authorities nonetheless distributed stable iodine to children and restricted the sale of dairy products.
and when they returned each morning to begin a new mission, the airmen found the grass beneath their parked aircraft had turned yellow overnight.
Not only would the parade take place, but they were all expected to attend and to bring their families with them—to demonstrate that there was no reason for anyone in Kiev to panic.
peasants watched as hundreds of square kilometers of fertile farmland in Belarus were lashed with black rain.
Instead of continuing to fall, the radioactive releases from the reactor had now suddenly begun to increase again, doubling from 3 million to 6 million curies overnight.
the China Syndrome had been made infamous as the title of the hit Hollywood movie released less than a month before the accident at Three Mile Island.
and hurl enough fallout into the atmosphere to render a large swath of Europe uninhabitable for a hundred years.
or how any of these elements might be interacting with the thousands of tonnes of different materials dropped from the helicopters.
But Soviet physicists had been so confident of the safety of their own reactors that they had never bothered indulging in the heretical theorizing of beyond design-basis accidents.
he gave orders for dynamic action and patriotic sacrifice on all fronts at once.
By 1986, Guskova had spent more than ten years presiding over the largest
radioactive injury clinic in the USSR. She had treated more than a thousand victims of severe radiation exposure
alpha, beta, and gamma radiation snap strands of DNA, and the exposed cells start to die.
A few meters here or there would make the difference between life and death.
“the Liquidation of the Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident.”
No formal plans, either civilian or military, had ever been devised to clean up after a nuclear disaster on such a scale.
The soldier was saved, but the few moments in the open were too much for the colonel: the next day, he was sent to a military hospital, suffering from radiation sickness.
clearing the radioactive rubble and soil from around Unit
remedy to the mountain of radioactive rubble at the north wall: they ordered it covered with concrete.
wearing regular army uniforms, protected only by cotton petal respirators.
They excavated the soil near the reactor walls with ordinary shovels
and began to pick them up using their hands.
as soon as they each reached their 25 rem limit, they should be sent from the zone, never to return.
the health of an entire generation of Soviet youth could be ruined, rendering the country incapable of defending itself in the event of an attack from the West.
The dust blanketed equipment, furniture, and documents in offices and found its way into the hair, lungs, and stomachs of those who worked in them.
Only the fate of the crows that had come to scavenge from the debris but stayed too long—and
the contamination had spread far across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.
The threat to the population from the radiation was twofold: external, from the fine irradiated dust and debris on the ground around them; and internal, from radioisotopes poisoning the food chain through the soil, crops, and farm animals.
radioisotopes poisoning the food chain
Group, he forecast that decontamination work would take up to seven years to complete.
and also to restart Chernobyl’s three remaining reactors as soon as possible.
demonstrate the might of the Socialist state and reassure the people of its commitment to nuclear energy.
Sarcophagus.
assure its people that the catastrophe was under control and that the radiation already released posed no long-term threat.
to reassure viewers that radiation levels in the republic remained within international limits. But now he advised that children should be allowed to play outside only for short periods and forbidden from ball games that might kick up dust.
This was a psychological complaint with physical manifestations—sweating, heart palpitations, nausea, and seizures—triggered by the nerves
local men to spread out across the contaminated territory to begin liquidating all the abandoned pets they could find.
There was no established methodology to follow.
scoured factories across the Union for anything that might be used to keep the dust at bay—so long as it was cheap and available in enormous quantities.
as their foliage changed gradually from deep green to coppery red.
The Pripyat marshes—the largest swamp in Europe—had become a massive sponge for strontium and cesium,
and the vast stretches of agricultural land proved too large to be scraped clean even by squadrons of earth-moving machines.
