CONTAINMENT AND EVACUATION

DATE : 27 April 1986 (Sunday)

TIME PERIOD : 07.00 AM - 10.00AM

SUBJECT : Radiation reading / extinguishing fire of Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor 04

When General Pikalov sets out in a truck fitted out with radiation apparatus to measure the radiation. He establishes that the graphite in the reactor is burning and that an enormous amount of radiation and heat is being given off at 15,000 rotengen every hour, nearly twice the radiation of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, it is capable of contaminating not just Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, but the entire European continent.

Task On Extinguishing the fire on Reactor 04

The final reading was enough to put immediate priority for Legasov was to extinguish fires on the roof of the station and the area around the building containing Reactor No. 4 to protect Reactor No. 3 and keep its core cooling systems intact. The fires were extinguished by 5:00, but many firefighters received high doses of radiation. The fire inside reactor No. 4 continued to burn until 10 May 1986; it is possible that well over half of the graphite burned out.

Some of that the core fire was extinguished by a combined effort of helicopters dropping more than 5,000 tonnes (11 million pounds) of sand, lead, clay, and neutron absorbing boron onto the burning reactor. Historians estimate that about 600 Soviet pilots risked dangerous levels of radiation to fly the thousands of flights needed to cover reactor No. 4 in this attempt to seal off the radiation.

Vladimir Pikalov was a Soviet general who was in charge of the specialised military units at the site of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster.

Pikalov personally made a detour around the nuclear power plant with radiation measurements instead of a team as he did not want to lose any of his soldiers lives after Legasov warned him about the extreme dangers of the mission

Actual radiation levels on Chernobyl Nuclear Plant

DATE : 27 April 1986 (Sunday)

TIME PERIOD : 07.00 AM - 10.00AM

MANAGED BY: Vladimir Pikalov

The ionizing radiation levels in the worst hit areas of the reactor building have been estimated to be 5.6 roentgens per second (R/s), equivalent to more than 20,000 roentgens per hour. A lethal dose is around 500 roentgens (~5 Gray (Gy) in modern radiation units) over five hours, so in some areas, unprotected workers received fatal doses in less than a minute. However, a dosimeter capable of measuring up to 1,000 R/s was buried in the rubble of a collapsed part of the building, and another one failed when turned on. Most remaining dosimeters had limits of 0.001 R/s and therefore read “off scale”. Thus, the reactor crew could ascertain only that the radiation levels were somewhere above 0.001 R/s (3.6 R/h), while the true levels were much higher in some areas.