Five years ago, on April 26, 2016, Ukraine commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster.
Sirens were sounded in the early morning hours on April 26 in Ukraine to mark 30 years since the moment that the first explosion blew the roof off the building housing a reactor at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant that sent a cloud of radioactive material high into the air, drifting into Russia and Belarus and across northern Europe.
President Petro Poroshenko, who attended a ceremony on April 26 at the site of the disaster, which is located in the middle of an uninhabitable “exclusion zone,” called the event a “catastrophe” and noted that the consequences of Chornobyl had not been resolved.
The disaster, he added, has been “a heavy burden on the shoulders of the Ukrainian people” and that the country was “still a long way” from overcoming the tragedy.
The Embassy of Ukraine in the U.S., in a statement to mark the disaster, called Chornobyl “the world’s worst accident at a nuclear power plant due to the number of its victims and the scale of its effects. It will take many more years and huge resources to finally overcome the effects of the Chornobyl disaster.”
The statement by the Embassy of Ukraine also noted that the explosion at Chornobyl in 1986 released nearly 60 tons of radioactive substances into the air, exceeding the release of radioactive material from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during the Second World War. Radiation levels from Chornobyl, the statement added, were not only recorded in the Soviet Union, but also in Western countries; the radioactive cloud also touched the East Coast of the United States.
The Embassy of Ukraine also highlighted the work of the “liquidators,” or first-responders who were sent to the scene to fight the fires that fueled the release of more radioactive material. Firefighters battled the blazes for more than 10 days, with 31 of the 240 responders succumbing to radiation poisoning, while the remaining firefighters received high doses of radiation. Their work is credited with preventing an even larger explosion from happening.
As of January 2016, Ukraine has registered more than 1.9 million citizens who are identified as victims of the Chornobyl disaster, including 108,530 disabled and 418,777 children. More than 35,000 families receive benefits due to the loss of a breadwinner whose death is related to the Chornobyl disaster.
Source: “30th anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster,” The Ukrainian Weekly, May 1, 2016.