Chernobyl Exclusion Zone: Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
And the final post from Chernobyl – the actual nuclear Power Plant aka ChAES in Russian acronym (Chernobyl Atomic Electropower Station). There were four operational reactors and two under construction when Reactor 4 blew up in the wheee hours of the morning of April 26, 1986. Hundreds of first responders died and thousands more received lethal radiation dozes in the ensuing cleanup (they couldn’t use robots in cleanup of the radioactive fallout because radiation disabled all the electronics; so they used “bio-robots” – normal people wearing lead plates over their bodies and working for 30-40 seconds at a time, most of whom eventually died). A cement and lead sarcophagus was built over the reactor later to seal the radiation, and another metal cover was built later on in 2017. You can get pretty close to Reactor 4 to snap pictures of it. Workers still work here in 30-day shifts, and we visited and ate at the station’s cafeteria (after going through machines that checked us for radiation contamination)… Later, on the way out from Chernobyl, we stopped at the monument to the heroic people who worked on saving the world from the deadly consequences of the Chernobyl explosion.
