Calendarul accidentelor nucleare

Chernobyl is a little village in the north of Ukraine right on the border with Belarus, 130 kilometres north of the present-day Ukrainian capital, Kiev. The nuclear reactors and town created specially for workers and their families were built there in the 1970s, eight kilometres from Chernobyl, on the little Pripiat river. The reactors were specially designed so that plutonium could easily be created for use in making nuclear bombs. Ten nuclear plants were supposed to be built on the Pripiat. Four were in operation and two under construction when, shortly after one o’clock in the morning on 26 April 1986, reactor 4 at Chernobyl exploded.

The radioactive cloud moved across Poland to Scandinavia.

On 28 April the automatic alarm at the Swedish Forsmark nuclear power plant went off. Radiation on the site was so high that it was at first suspected there had been an accident at Forsmark. Only then did the world get to hear of the Chernobyl disaster, the most serious nuclear accident in industrial history.

The radioactive pollution in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia is today still extensive. Entire regions are forbidden from producing food and most people living in the areas affected are ill. By 2002, according to official Ukrainian statistics, 15,000 of the young people who had been forced to work to clean up the irradiated area had died.

The photos that follow were taken in the Chernobyl region in June and July 2005.