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Altogether, 50 million curies of radiation were released by the Chernobyl explosion, the equivalent of 500 Hiroshima bombs.
the damage done by the first explosion will last for centuries. The half-life of the plutonium-239 that was released by the Chernobyl explosion—and carried by winds all the way to Sweden—is 24,000 years.
Besides, the fact that there were signs saying “meat” or “cheese” did not mean that those products were actually available. It was the Soviet Union, after all, where the gap between the image projected by government propaganda and reality was bridged only by jokes. I retell one of them: “If you want to fill your fridge with food, plug the fridge into the radio outlet.” The radio was telling the story of ever-improving living standards; the empty fridge had its own story to tell.
More difficult was the situation with fresh meat, which was often supplemented with lard and bones, but then, at least there were villages around the town where meat and milk could be bought.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a safe level of nuclear contamination of a territory is 5 curies per square kilometer. It is anyone’s guess what impact 1.5 million curies had on the people and the territory around the station, including the city of Leningrad, less than 50 kilometers away.
178 control rods began to move in the active zone of the reactor. They were 7 meters long, moved at a speed of 40 centimeters per second, and were made of boron, which absorbed neutrons and reduced the rate of the reaction. The tips of the rods, however, were made of graphite, and the graphite tips appear to have tipped the already highly unstable reactor toward catastrophe. As the rods began to descend into the core of the reactor, the tips replaced neutron-absorbing water in the top part of the active zone, thus not decreasing, but further increasing, the rate of the reaction. This was the
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problem of RBMK reactors that had almost destroyed one of them at the Leningrad power station in 1975. Now the positive void effect was once again at work.
neither steam nor smoke nor fire was visible in the broken spaces of the roof; what could be seen instead were the stars shining brightly in the night sky.”6 Diatlov was horrified by what he saw: “A picture worthy of the pen of the great Dante!” he recalled later.
The evacuees brought not only their irradiated bodies to their temporary homes but also their contaminated clothing and personal belongings. With the evacuation of Prypiat and its nearby villages complete, the buses returned to Kyiv. They were assigned to their regular routes, where they spread high levels of radiation around a city of 2 million people.36
