Chernobyl Disaster Essay

On April 26th, 1986, a catastrophic nuclear accident occurred at the Chernobyl power plant. It contained four Nuclear reactors of type RBMK-1000. “The Chernobyl complex consists of four reactors constructed between 1977 and 1983 (No. 1 in 1977, No. 2 in 1978, No. 3 in 1981, and No. 4 in 1983)” (Chernobyl- accident – Ukraine: 1986). The reactors were produced by the Soviet Union. At Chernobyl, reactors one and two were first generation and reactors three and four were the second generation Those reactors were used to produce electricity. Each reactor produced 1,000 megawatts of electric power. They also produced 3.2 GW of thermal power. The four reactors supplied Ukraine with about 10% of its power at the time of the accident. Large amounts of radioactive were released during the disaster. Along with the Radioactive particles, there was an explosion and fire. The main question here is what caused the explosion. Reactor four suffered an …show more content…
Within a few weeks of the disaster, 30 workers died who were present at the disaster. Along with these 30 workers, another 100 workers suffered from radiation injury. According to radiation injuries, 115,000 people were relocated to insure their safety. 220,000 more people from Belarus were also relocated. Because of these events, people suffered from both social and psychological problems. In 2005, UNSCEAR reported that more than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer were present in both children and adults. The shocking part is that those reported people were present in the disaster. The main health impact in Chernobyl was thyroid cancer. While there were 9,000 cases of thyroid cancer, only 9 of them died. The main question is how does radiation cause cancer? Ionizing radiation is known to cause DNA breaks which develops cancer tumors. The main problem is that the driving mutation wasn’t found. The main isotope that was released during the disaster was Iodine-131. Since