Chernobyl disaster leaves an uncertain legacy

PRIPYAT, Ukraine — Working the overnight shift on April 26, 1986, Chernobyl engineer Alexander Nihaev remembers a thud — “like somebody hit my chair from underneath.”

“We kind of felt ill at ease, and then a few seconds later there was another jolt,” Nihaev recalled. “The alarm went off in the central hall, warning of excessive radioactivity.”

Nihaev and his team of engineers were among the first to join rescue operations at the Chernobyl nuclear power station’s fourth reactor, reduced to a mangled, toxic mess of burning nuclear fuel by a botched maintenance procedure that should have been routine.

The men worked for hours supplying water to put out fires. Sometime after sunrise, vomiting and hardly able to move from exhaustion and exposure to near lethal levels of radiation, Nihaev staggered home to Pripyat, a purpose-built city for 45,000 of Chernobyl’s workers. He found his wife doing the washing up with the windows of their apartment wide open.

For days, the Soviet government tried to keep the scale of the disaster under wraps. Nihaev knew better. He told his wife to seal the windows, collect the kids from school and stay with relatives, as far away as possible from the plume of smoke spewing radioactive particles into the sky over the Chernobyl power plant.

Nihaev, suffering from radiation burns over 100 percent of his body, was evacuated to Moscow for treatment.

NBC VIDEO Against the odds April 25: Alexander Nihaev, an engineer working at Chernobyl's nuclear power plant when the 4th reactor exploded, explains how he survived. NBC News

Veil of secrecy
Twenty years after the Chernobyl disaster, memories are still fresh.

Over a period of ten days, the accident released radiation equivalent to 100 Hiroshima bombs. Weather patterns brought radioactive fallout down in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, at that time republics of the Soviet Union. Eventually, scientists detected high levels of radiation as far away as Scandinavia and Ireland, news of which which forced the Soviets to lift the veil of secrecy over the disaster.

Before the rest of the world was aware of what had happened, though, the Soviet authorities tried to mop things up undetected.

Two days after the accident, authorities ordered a mass evacuation of the region around Chernobyl. Some 116,000 people, including the entire city of Pripyat, were dispersed on thousands of buses. Simultaneously, tens of thousands of soldiers were moved to the reactor to help contain radioactive debris.

“The soldiers worked in shifts of just 30-40 seconds,” recalled Igor Kostin, who took some of the first photographs of the exploded reactor and cleanup operation. “They only had time to throw one shovel-full of radioactive material down the hole and run away. And for all that they gave them a certificate and 100 rubles. That's about $25 dollars today, for a man to receive a near lethal dose of radiation.”

All told, some 600,000 people were immediately affected by the disaster, either because they lived near Chernobyl or participated in the cleanup of what is now an 18-mile safety zone extending in all directions around the reactor.

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