On April 26, 1986, an accident occurred at Unit 4 of the nuclear power station at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in the former USSR. The accident, caused by a sudden surge of power, destroyed the reactor and released massive amounts of radioactive material into the environment. After the accident, access to the area in a thirty kilometer radius around the plant was closed, except for persons requiring official access to the plant, to the immediate area for evaluating and dealing with the consequences of the accident, and operation of the undamaged units. People wonder at what happens inside the Zone. They want to know what happened there, at the power plant, that fateful night, that ended in thousands of deaths and many miles of uninhabitable land. The following is a brief history of chernobyl and the surrounding area.
The town of Chernobyl, named after the Ukrainian word for mugwort, is situated about 110 miles north of Kiev, the modern capital of Ukraine, and just to the west of Chernigov Oblast, the site of the original seventeenth-century Ukrainian state. It was founded in the twelfth century and remained small for most of the next 800 years. By 1986, Chernobyl's population had reached 10,000 and the town was officially classified as a radon district in northern Kiev Oblast.
A paved road connects Kiev with Chernobyl and runs through a series of small peasant villages. The nuclear power station is located about 12 miles north of Chernobyl. Two miles further on lies the town of Pripyat, one of several "nuclear" communities built in the 1970s for employees of the station, their families, service personnel, and fire crews. Like most Soviet towns, Pripyat consists of high-rise apartment blocks. It possesses a fairground and two soccer pitches, but no church. At the time of the accident, Pripyat's population was estimated at 45,000 and growing. Eight miles north of Pripyat stands the border between Ukraine and the Gomel Oblast of the Republic of Belarus ,then the...