Less than 60 seconds after Engineers working at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant decided to the test reactor unit four safety in the event of a power failure, a giant steam explosion, on April 26, 1986, created the largest accidental release of radiation into the environment in history. 51 weeks later 350,000 people have been evacuated from three different countries. The people left, but nature remained. What happened to it? Let’s get technical.
If you wanted to know exactly what would happen to an environment after a nuclear meltdown, there really is no better place on Earth to study than the silent forest in the crumbling infrastructure immediately surrounding the Chernobyl reactor unit four. Specifically you want to look into the area known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, set up as a boundary after the accident which we explain in detail in the previous episode of this program.
It extends kilometers in every direction from the failed nuclear reactor. What happened and what is still happening to the world inside of this exclusion zone is the subject of over 30 years worth of study. Today we’re going to look into all of those studies to find out what actually happened. Did the Deer grow two heads. Did the birds start to glow or is all this talk of mutated animals and nuclear wasteland, as you might see, say, on the internet, a bit less critical than may assume?
Previous Episodes of this program
Chernobyl’s Radioactive Lava is Still Hot
Is Nuclear Power Actually Dangerous? | Because Science Footnotes
The Organism that Eats Radiation | Because Science Footnotes
