How Much Do You Know About the Chernobyl Disaster?

Today, Ukraine is an independent country. It's called "Ukrainia" by Russians and Ukrainians and sometimes "the Ukraine" by Westerners of a certain age. The use of the article "the" came about because "ukraine" means "borderland" as a common noun; hence "the borderland." However, that's a mildly offensive term to Ukrainians.

1970 was the year that the nearby workers' community was founded (We'd mention it by name, but that's the answer to another question). It wasn't until the mid-'80s that the reactor meltdown occurred.

Nuclear fission is the breakup of atom nuclei into smaller nuclei, which releases a great deal of energy. Fusion and decay are also processes that release power, though not as effectively. "Cold fusion" dreams a pipe dream: Nuclear fusion at temperatures far lower than the solar/stellar ones required at present.

The drill was meant to practice protocols to keep the reactors going in the event of a power outage. Both the power to the reactors and the safety systems were deliberately shut off, to simulate actual conditions in case of a power failure.

Typically, in major accidents (not just nuclear, but events like plane crashes as well), there isn't a single cause, and this is true of the Chernobyl disaster. The event has been extensively studied, and all three of the above factors were found to be at play.

Atlas Obscura, the online magazine of the odd and amazing, wrote an article on the ghost town of Pripyat, which some urban adventurers are now exploring. Among other things, the reporter notes is that "all clocks are frozen at 11:55, the moment the electricity was cut." Spooky!

You've undoubtedly heard this word, though probably in a metaphoric sense. It's been widely adopted as a term for "unwanted or negative results," e.g., "the fallout from the candidate's unwise public statement."

Firefighters bore the brunt of the meltdown's immediate health effects. Many of the 28 persons who died of radiation sickness after the accident were firefighters (and others were employees of the plant).

When we say this, we don't mean that the death toll was "countless" and that a cover-up is the reason the true number is unknown. It's actually the opposite. A United Nations/Ukraine joint study has concluded that, long-term, the death toll is probably between 4,000 and 6,000. It's smaller groups, like survivors' organizations, which suggest the number is near 90,000.

More than 49,000 people were living in the planned town of Pripyat. The evacuation took about three hours, an astoundingly quick process for nearly 50,000 people, but there had been drills for just this events. Plus, you've got to imagine that the town's residents were motivated to leave.

To this day, the nuclear accident in Ukraine is the worst in history. This includes the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, which was the result of a tsunami following an earthquake.

Many people simply call it "the Zone." It was established very shortly after the meltdown by a Soviet regulatory commission and remains in place to this day, with some adjustments to the individual zones within.

Our first guess would have been "hectare," imagining radiation pervading land and water at certain levels, depending on the distance from the plant. But the key unit here is that of time: How many mSv are you getting every hour (which can be extrapolated to every day)?

Bear in mind, this is the very baseline. Want to fly coast-to-coast? Your exposure will rise to 400 mSV for the entire one-way trip. An exposure of about 100,000 mSV is required to raise your cancer risk. This puts the levels in the inhabitable "Blue Zone" (about 30-50 mSV per hour) in perspective.

The nuclear power plant had four reactors. Number 1 had a partial meltdown in 1982, but the news was not made public at the time, and it was repaired and put back into service.

A "sarcophagus" is, in general, a box built to hold a dead body. So it's apt that this has become the nickname for the massive steel-and-concrete structure built around the "dead" reactor. The sarcophagus itself is now covered with another structure, called the New Safe Confinement structure.

In a time period spanning about 18 months after the meltdown, nearly a quarter million workers filled this role. Actually, liquidators had many roles, including hunting down pets that had gone feral after the evacuation. (Sounds cold, but somebody had to do it, we suppose).

18 billion rubles is about $27 million dollars, by 2019's exchange rate. Adjusted for inflation, it's fairer to day that the USSR spent somewhere around $65 million U.S. dollars on the cleanup effort.

Thirty kilometers is approximately 19 miles; as the term "radius" implies, the Zone is shaped as a circle. Within the circles are "sub-zones" of Black, Red and Blue.

The Black Zone isn't defined by units of distance, but rather by radiation — it's the area where radiation levels are at more than 200 micro-sieverts per hour. As noted elsewhere, this is comparable to the exposure you'd get in a coast-to-coast U.S. flight — but still not the kind of exposure that humans should be getting, long-term.

What differentiates the Red Zone from the Black Zone is that the Red Zone is projected to be inhabited again some day. About the concept of "vacation homes" near a dead nuclear power plant ... We really don't imagine there'll be any takers on that one.

Not everyone had to leave this part of the Exclusion Zone, but the young and pregnant women were/are at higher risk from radiation. They were moved out of this exterior ring of the Exclusion Zone in 1986, after the major round of evacuations.

This might surprise you, but the other reactors continued to operate for some time. Number 2 was shut down in 1992, 1 in 1996, and number 3 stayed running until the year 2000.

Chernobyl is neither the nearest town to the plant nor a big city, but it was the administrative center of the district where the nuclear power plant was situated and was home to about 14,000 people. Chernobyl was evacuated after the meltdown, though a few residents have returned to occupy their homes.

Kiev, also spelled "Kyiv," is the capital of Ukraine. This tidbit is a "know before you go" piece of information, as Kiev is where the tour companies offering Pripyat/Chernobyl visits are generally based, and where you'll most likely stay if you want to be comfortable.

You've very likely seen this in movies. It's a handheld device run up and down a person's body, not actually touching skin or clothing. Geiger counters obviously became useful after the accident.

President Reagan, the former governor of California, was a proponent of nuclear energy himself. He spared government funding for America's nuclear program during a drastic round of budget-cutting in the early 1980s.

Andrei Gromyko held the highest office from mid-1985 to 1988. He was a conservative with "hardline" policies toward the West, but was increasingly occupied with internal issues, not least of which was the reactor meltdown at Chernobyl.

Three Mile Island is in Pennsylvania. In 1979, there was a leak of radioactive coolant caused by a valve stuck in its open position. Despite evacuations and an increase in anti-nuclear sentiment, there has been no statistically significant increase in cancers due to the leak.

About 15 children are estimated to have gotten thyroid cancer as a result of the accident and died of their cancers. Today, people living near nuclear power plants are often eligible for government-provided iodine tablets to keep on hand; taken shortly after exposure, these can prevent thyroid cancer.

Anyone can take an Exclusion Zone tour. Guides have Geiger counters, and tourists are screened post-tour to ensure that they are not carrying radioactive material out of the Zone as souvenirs.

Nuclear-grade graphite is a bit different from what you find in a pencil, of course. It's used in nuclear reactors, thanks in part to its ability to tolerate high temperatures — but when it burns, it burns very hot.

Lenin, of course, was one of the master architects of Soviet Communism. The city of St. Petersburg was renamed for him during the Soviet era. That was an honorary naming that went a little better than the Chernobyl plant (though the city has now reverted to its original name of St. Petersburg).

It might surprise you to know that some people wanted to return to the evacuation area. You'd expect people to want to get out (and then hit up the government to be repaid for their relocation costs). But people are strange sometimes; see also Centralia, Pennsylvania, and the residents who stubbornly stay in that ghost town despite living above a raging mine fire.

When you think about it, this isn't surprising — these people had spent their entire lives in one area, and were ill-equipped for life elsewhere. The Soviet government first tried to prevent samosely from returning to their homes, but eventually practiced a kind of "benign neglect" about the samosely phenomenon.