Having built the first nuclear station in the USSR in 1954 and forcing the atom to serve peaceful purposes, mankind believed in finding the cheapest electricity. In the 80s of the XX century, there were already 360 nuclear power plants in the countries. On April 26, 1986, the world community recognized its true price: tens of thousands of human lives killed by radiation and its consequences, 300,000 homeless, abandoned cities and villages. But there could have been more victims, if not for the people, the true heroes of Chernobyl, who had prevented an even greater catastrophe at the cost of their lives.
Chernobyl accident
On the night of April 26, residents of the Ukrainian cities of Pripyat and Chernobyl, respectively, located 4 and 18 km from the nuclear power station, where most of the adult population worked, respectively, slept peacefully. In the shield room of the 4th block, where tests of reactor No. 4 were carried out, their tragic fate was decided for many years. As the government commission subsequently determines, during the tests the permissible parameters were violated, which caused uncontrolled processes that resulted in a reactor explosion. 50 tons of nuclear fuel escaped, which is 10 times higher than the figures of the infamous Hiroshima.
The Chernobyl leadership will be punished: the deputy chief engineer A. Dyatlov, conducting the test, and the Chernobyl director V. Bryukhanov will receive a term of 10 years. From the effects of radiation, the first will die in 1995. The chief engineer will lose his mind. Only in the nineties did the government commission recognize that the fatal error in the design of the reactor itself became the main culprit of the accident. Be that as it may, the first participants in the Chernobyl accident were station employees. When the building of the power unit was destroyed, two were killed, all the rest (134 people) fell ill with radiation sickness, of whom 24 died soon (28 along with firefighters).
Confronted with Further Disaster
After two explosions with a difference of two seconds (1 hour 23 minutes), the reactor was completely destroyed, causing about 30 fires. Station operators were the first to rush to extinguish them without hesitation. While director V. Bryukhanov, who arrived at the station at 2 o'clock, was in a state of shock, they struggled in the electric shop to prevent a hydrogen explosion, which could cover Minsk, which is more than 300 km away.
The country should know the names of the heroes of Chernobyl. The 47-year-old deputy shift supervisor, Alexander Lelechenko, personally cut off the hydrogen supply to the engine room, on the roof of which there was already a fire.
For four days he remained at the workplace, eliminating the consequences of the Chernobyl accident and ensuring the safe operation of the first three units of the nuclear power plant. From a dose of radiation incompatible with life , Alexander Lelechenko died on May 7, already in the two thousandth he received the posthumous title of Hero of Ukraine.
Authentic Heroes - Chernobyl Firefighters
The combat alert raised the guards of firefighters from Chernobyl and Pripyat, the first of which arrived at the station 7 minutes after the start of the disaster. 28 people rushed to fight the fire under the leadership of lieutenants Vladimir Pravik and Viktor Kabenka. Both are 23 years old, but by their example they led the fighters, giving clear commands and being where the most difficult. The general management was carried out by Major Telyatnikov, under whose command there were 69 people and 14 pieces of equipment. Almost without protective equipment, having only mittens, helmets and tarpaulin robes, without using KIP-5 gas masks due to high temperatures, firefighters did not suspect a deadly level of radiation until three at night.
By four in the morning the fire was localized, by six it was completely extinguished. Losing consciousness during the fight against fire, many firefighters received a lethal dose of radiation and were sent for treatment in Moscow and Kiev. Of the 13 people treated in the 6th clinical hospital of the capital, 11 died. Among them are Viktor Kabenok and Vladimir Pravik, who became a father a month before the tragedy. Doctors say that the chosen method of treatment for Dr. Gale was erroneous. Professor Leonid Kinzelsky in Kiev, using his own method of treatment, managed to save all patients. Three firefighters, Vladimir Pravik, Viktor Kabenk and Leonid Telyatnikov, were awarded the title Heroes of the Soviet Union. Only the last, who rose to the rank of general, managed to survive.
Firefighters - Heroes of Ukraine
Three firefighters from among the first to be at the scene of the disaster received the title of Hero of Ukraine. Among them is Vasily Ignatenko, a 25-year-old senior sergeant. At the cost of his life, the young man pulled out of his fire three of his comrades, who had lost consciousness from exposure. His pregnant wife could not save her daughter, having received radiation when visiting her husband in a Moscow hospital. The dose was fatal for the newborn.
26-year-old sergeant Nikolai Vashchuk and 23-year-old Nikolai Tytenok were among those whom Ignatenko saved. But all of them have the same destiny - to die in a hospital. Both worked at the highest altitude, preventing the spread of fire to the third power unit. It was there that the level of radiation was the highest. The heroes of Chernobyl left behind a grateful memory, and also two sons.
Firefighter - Hero of Russia
The head of the department of the Main Directorate of Fire Protection of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, Lt. Col. Vladimir Maksimchuk, arrived at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as part of a government commission. He had the share to head the fire extinguishing on the night of May 23. They kept silent about this story for a long time: the threat of a new explosion of the 4th reactor arose after the ignition of circular pumps and high voltage cables. Not allowing fire crews, with a reconnaissance group, the lieutenant colonel entered the scene of the fire. Having established the degree of danger and identified the level of radiation (250 x-rays per hour), Vladimir Maksimchuk personally organized rescue operations, determining the maximum time spent on the fire territory for ten minutes.
Special equipment was introduced into the fire-fighting zone, and combat calculations were constantly changing, informing each other about the changes taking place. The commander himself with each group again and again found himself at the most dangerous point, serving as an example of personal courage. This is for the country for many years - the most "secret" feat. The heroes of Chernobyl were presented for awards, and forty firefighters led by the commander would be unknown on the hospital bed. In 1994, at the age of 46 and the rank of major general of the Ministry of Internal Affairs internal service, Vladimir Maksimchuk died, being posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Russia in 2003.
Who are the liquidators
One of the first eyewitnesses to remove the reactor after the accident was the news agency operator Igor Kostin. He saw a picture of complete defeat, as if after an atomic war. The consequences of the Chernobyl accident are not only the release of nuclear fuel, but also the strongest radioactive contamination on an area of 200 thousand square kilometers. The smoldering reactor continued to release radioactive gas and dust into the atmosphere, this had to be stopped. The possibility of a repeated explosion was not ruled out because of the danger that a concrete slab would crack under the reactor, and magma would combine with water.
However, the authorities ignored the consequences of the disaster, and the first press releases appeared only after 36 hours. A radiation cloud was recorded in Europe, and a full-scale evacuation of the population from the nearby area, which went down in history as an exclusion zone, has not yet begun. People began to be taken out of a radius of thirty kilometers after measurements made by the military of a group of Colonel Grebenyuk in Pripyat. They not only showed a catastrophic increase in radiation during the day, but also shocked the Institute of Atomic Energy with absolute numbers. The radiation background exceeded permissible norms 600 thousand times!
From the first hours of the accident, specialists from nuclear plants and military units drove into the place of evacuated residents who left the infected territory within a week. Later they began to be called liquidators. 600 thousand people were involved in eliminating the consequences of the disaster after President Gorbachev’s appeal on television 18 days after the start of the tragic events.
Army feat
Each of those who arrived to eliminate the consequences of the accident knew well what Chernobyl was. Over the years, the liquidation heroes do not at all regret that they had to confront the invisible enemy - penetrating radiation. Despite health problems and the death of friends from serious illnesses. 100 thousand of them are representatives of the army, including 600 helicopter pilots who did everything to silence the emergency reactor. The government commission for the elimination of the consequences of the accident included Academician V. A. Legasov, who developed the composition of the mixture for casting into the reactor zone: sand, boric acid and lead. After 48 hours, work began, for which the best helicopter pilots were involved, including those recalled from Afghanistan.
The radiation level above the reactor was 9 times higher than the lethal dose, the air temperature at an altitude of 200 meters was 120-180 degrees. In conditions of hot radioactive air and danger to life, soldiers dropped their bags weighing 80 kg with bare hands, and pilots made up to 33 sorties per day, immediately receiving radiation of 5-6 x-rays. It took 6 thousand tons of the mixture to reduce emissions of deadly substances by 35%. Among the helicopter pilots there are Heroes of the Soviet Union. One of them is Nikolai Melnik, who lowered a six-hundred-kilogram pipe with measuring instruments into the reactor from a height to find out the nature of the processes inside to avoid repeated explosions. This filigree operation went down in history under the name “Needle”.
Stock warriors
The liquidators of the Chernobyl accident are not only professional specialists, but also former soldiers and officers aged twenty to thirty years involved in army training. Everything around the fourth reactor was littered with radiation fuel. The most difficult thing was to remove graphite and radioactive debris from the roof, where they used robotics. But the overwhelming level of radiation disabled it, so the need arose to attract people. These heroes of Chernobyl went down in history as “biorobots”. Major General Tarakanov led the operation to remove radioactive elements , having calculated that even in a protective suit a person cannot be in the radiation zone with 7,000 x-rays for more than forty seconds.
In order to dump radioactive waste into two shovels, young men with a protective weight of 26-30 kg for 2.5 weeks climbed to the roof, risking their life and health. Igor Kostin and Konstantin Fedotov had to repeat their little feat five times. As a reward, “biorobots” received an army liquidator certificate and a prize of one hundred rubles. According to medical forecasts, one in five of these guys will die before they reach the age of 40. The war with the invisible enemy did not end with the completion of the liquidation of the Chernobyl accident.
The construction of the sarcophagus
Most of all, the emergency station needed professionals. Firefighters prevented a new explosion by pumping water under the concrete slab of the reactor, miners dug a tunnel 150 meters long from the third power unit to install a cooling chamber on liquid nitrogen, and engineers at the Kurchatov Institute cut open the walls with autogenes to determine the degree of danger. The whole country was mobilized to provide assistance to the affected areas, and a virtually front-line situation was created. An account for donations was opened, to which 520 million rubles were received within six months. The final stage of work on taming nuclear energy was to be the construction of a protective sarcophagus for the burial of a "smoking" reactor. There was no analogue to such an object in the world, therefore, those who designed and built it under conditions close to combat are the true heroes of Chernobyl.
206 days were required for the construction of a concrete reactor shell weighing 150 tons and a height of 170 meters. Lev Bocharov, one of the developers of the facility, admits that the most difficult thing was that each part had to be constructed separately to avoid unnecessary casualties. Remote construction led to the fact that, despite the labor of 90 thousand people, the use of a huge number of metal structures and cement, after 28 years there was a collapse of the hinged slabs of several hundred meters. More helicopter overflights in 2007 and radiation measurements showed that the power unit is still a danger. Therefore, today the new Shelter-2 project is being implemented with the participation of European countries and the United States of America.
The 30-kilometer area around the nuclear power plant is still an exclusion zone, where people are in danger due to radioactive contamination. Pripyat turned into a preserved monument of the tragedy of 1986.
Dedicated to the Heroes of Chernobyl
The Chernobyl tragedy showed the whole world what could happen if nuclear energy goes out of control. It intensified the process of nuclear disarmament and became, in fact, the beginning of the end of the USSR. But she also demonstrated to the world community the courage and heroism of ordinary people of different nationalities, who stood shoulder to shoulder in the name of saving European civilization. The leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine V.V.Sherbitsky, who helps to conceal the true scale of the Chernobyl accident, will commit suicide. Scientist V.A. Legasov will not be able to survive the tragedy, feeling the guilt of the scientific community in what happened. But there is nothing to be ashamed of those who will forever remain living in bronze and our memory. On the 25th anniversary of the tragedy in Ukraine, Vyacheslav Kokuba composed the song “Glory to the Heroes of Chernobyl”, which speaks of gratitude “to those who saved the world from the tragedy, to those who saved their honor and uniform”.
In Ukraine, the Hero of Chernobyl medal has been established, which is still awarded to liquidators who have shown particular courage in a difficult period for the country. Three years ago, the award found in Kyrgyzstan the doctor Iskender Shayakhmetov, who worked a hundred meters from the block that saved the lives of dozens of people. And at the Kiev Institute of Radiation Medicine there is still an unequal struggle with the invisible enemy for the life of the former liquidators. Professor Anatoly Chumak is visited from all over the former USSR. In many cities, monuments have been erected for courageous Chernobyl heroes, many of whom passed away years after the effects of radiation sickness.