With horror, mankind realizes how much evil it does on the planet that has given it shelter, and the biggest of them is nuclear disaster. It’s as if we don’t even think about the harm that huge industrial corporations with a high level of danger of their activities bring, because they strive only for profit, and material well-being is a priority for mankind today. And it, humanity, having broken into conflicting parts, is trying to protect its conquests, forgetting that almost all nuclear disasters occur during the testing of weapons. This article will list the worst of them in terms of the amount of damage done.
1954
A nuclear disaster in the United States occurred as a result of a test explosion in the Marshall Islands region, which turned out more than a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions in total. The US government decided to conduct an experiment in the Bikini Atoll. And this explosion is only part of a monstrous experiment.
What happened? Nuclear disasters, without exception, bring irreversible consequences, but in this case, events unfolded unprecedentedly. A monstrous misfortune occurred, destroying all life on an area of 11,265.41 square meters. km Nuclear disasters of this magnitude did not occur on Earth until March 1954. 655 representatives of the fauna completely disappeared. Until now, water and bottom soil samples have not shown positive results; it is extremely dangerous to be in these areas.
1979
Another nuclear disaster in the United States occurred on Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. An unknown amount of radioactive iodine and radioactive gases was released into the environment. This happened due to the fault of the staff, who made a number of mistakes, as a result of mechanical problems. The general public was not allowed access to information about this disaster, the authorities concealed specific numbers in order to prevent panic.
It was impossible to even argue about the scale of pollution, since the country's leadership immediately began to assert that the emission was insignificant. However, the fauna and flora were so damaged that this could not be overlooked. People exposed to radiation in neighboring areas suffered from leukemia and cancer 10 times more than in other places. In 1997, the data were discovered and re-examined. Due to irreversible consequences, this accident is included in world nuclear catastrophes of especially large scale.
First in the world
The very first nuclear explosion occurred in July 1945 in the United States, New Mexico. Robert Oppenheimer, who is considered the "father" of a nuclear bomb, led the tests of still unknown weapons . The first was plutonium, and the creators gave her the affectionate name "Little thing." The next one was called “Fat Man,” and it was “Fat Man” who fell three weeks later on the heads of innocent people. The day of August 6, 1945 was an unforgettable mournful milestone in the history of mankind.
The American military used an atomic bomb, dropping it on Hiroshima, a densely populated Japanese city that was literally wiped off the face of the earth. Power "Fat Man" - eighteen thousand tons of TNT. More than eighty thousand people died at one moment, another hundred and forty thousand died a little later. But death didn’t end there, they continued for years from wounds and radiation. Three days later, the same fate befell the city of Nagasaki, where there were as many victims. Thus, the United States forced Japan to capitulate in World War II.
1957 nuclear disaster
The Windscale accident became the largest in the history of Great Britain. The complex was built to produce plutonium, but later they decided to redesign it for the production of tritium, the basis for hydrogen and atomic bombs. As a result, the reactor could not stand the load, and a fire started in it.
Without thinking twice, the workers flooded the reactor with water. The fire was eventually extinguished. But the whole area was infected - all rivers, all lakes. Why is the nuclear reaction process out of control? Because there was no normal instrumentation, and the staff made many mistakes.
Effects
The energy release was too large, and the metal uranium in the fuel channel reacted with air. As a result, the fuel elements of the fuel channels were heated up to almost one and a half thousand degrees Celsius, they increased in volume and jammed in the channels, so it was not possible to unload them. The fire spread to one hundred and fifty channels with eight tons of uranium. I could not cool the carbon dioxide in the core. Therefore, on October 11, 1957, the reactor was flooded with water. The radioactive release was approximately twenty thousand curies, and long-term contamination with cesium-137 contained up to eight hundred curies.
Now metal fuel is not used in modern reactors. In total, more than eleven tons of radioactive uranium burned there. The result was that the release of radionuclides began. Huge areas in Ireland and England were contaminated, and a radioactive cloud traveled to Germany, Denmark, and Belgium. In England itself, cases of leukemia were significantly more frequent. The contaminated water used by the locals has caused numerous cancers.
Kyshtym
Then, in 1957, an accident occurred in the USSR in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-40, where the Mayak chemical plant is located. It was a very large nuclear disaster in Russia. Nearby is Lake Kyshtym, and this serious emergency was called the Kyshtym tragedy. At the end of September, the cooling system at the plant was out of order, because of this a tank with highly radioactive nuclear waste exploded.
More than twelve thousand people were evacuated from the disaster area, twenty-three villages ceased to exist. The accident was liquidated by the military. In general, two hundred seventy thousand residents of the Tyumen, Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk regions were in the pollution zone. Information about the tragedy was also carefully hidden, officially the truth was only told in 1989. In terms of damage, this is also a very large nuclear disaster.
At the Chernobyl nuclear power plant
In Ukraine, in Pripyat there was an explosion of a nuclear reactor, which until recently was considered the largest global technological accident. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) was so strong that air emissions exceeded the consequences of a nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki four hundred times.
But there the main harm happened from the shock wave, and here the radioactive infection became much more terrible. Since the accident, more than thirty people have died from radiation sickness in three months. More than a hundred thousand were evacuated. Why the explosion occurred is still not entirely clear, because the opinions of scientists are fundamentally different from each other.
Effects
And the consequences became terrifying. The release of uranium dioxide into the environment was very large. Before the accident in the fourth block reactor, there were about one hundred and eighty tons of nuclear fuel, up to thirty percent of which was released. The rest melted and flowed into the faults of the reactor vessel. But, in addition to fuel, there were fission products, transuranic elements, that is, radioactive isotopes that accumulate while the reactor is operating. The greatest radiation hazard threatens just from them. Volatiles were thrown out of the reactor.
And these are tellurium and cesium aerosols, more than fifty percent of iodine is a mixture of solid particles and steam, as well as organic compounds, all gases that were contained in the reactor. In total, the activity of discarded substances turned out to be huge. Iodine-131, cesium-137, strontium-90, plutonium isotopes and much more. The 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine still makes itself felt. And people are still vividly interested in her. An interesting series was shot in the genre of science fiction "Chernobyl. Exclusion Zone." In the second season, the situation is transferred to the United States, where, instead of the Ukrainian, a nuclear disaster allegedly occurred on August 7, 1986 in Maryland.
Summary
In fact, this was not there. All results are summarized here. And this is more than two hundred thousand hectares of contaminated soils, of which seventy percent - the territory of Ukraine, Russia, Belarus. The nature of the pollution was not uniform, it all depended on the direction of the wind after the accident. The areas directly close to Chernobyl were especially affected: Kiev, Zhytomyr, Gomel, Bryansk. High background radiation was observed even in Chuvashia and Mordovia, and radioactive fallout occurred in the Leningrad Region. The largest part of plutonium and strontium fell within a radius of one hundred kilometers, and cesium and iodine spread much wider.
In the first few weeks, tellurium and iodine were a danger to the population; they have a short half-life. But so far and for many decades they will kill in these territories isotopes of strontium and cesium, which lie on a surface of the soil. Cesium-137 is present in high concentration in all plants and fungi, all insects and animals are contaminated. And the isotopes americium and plutonium are stored, without losing radioactivity, hundreds and thousands of years. Their number is not so great, but americium-241 will also increase, because it is formed when plutonium-241 decays. However, the 1986 nuclear disaster in its consequences was not as terrible as the one discussed below.
Fukushima
Today, the accident at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant is not only the saddest event in the history of Japan, but also the most terrible for the whole time of the existence of mankind on Earth. It happened on March 11 in 2011. At first, the country was shocked by a powerful earthquake, after a few hours all of northern Japan was literally washed away by a huge tsunami wave. The earthquake disrupted energy ties, and this was precisely the main cause of the disaster, which has no equal so far.
The tsunami wave disabled the reactors, chaos began, the plants quickly heated up, there was no chance of cooling (the pumps did not work without electricity). Radioactive vapor was simply released into the atmosphere, but still, after a day, the first block of the nuclear power plant exploded. Next, two more power units exploded. And today, the level of pollution around Fukushima is unusually high.
Situation today
The decontamination, which is carried out there, does not cleanse the earth, just radiation is transferred to other places. All nuclear power plants in northern Japan were shut down, and there were a whole chain of them - twenty-five nuclear reactors. Now they are included in the work again, despite public protests. The area is too seismological and the risk is huge. It may well be the same situation with any of the other stations.
Almost eight hundred thousand terabecarels of radiation were released into the atmosphere, this is not so much, about fifteen percent of the Chernobyl emission. But here is much worse. Polluted water and now continues to flow from the already destroyed station, radioactive waste is accumulating. The Pacific Ocean is becoming more and more polluted every day. Fish even far from the Japanese coast cannot be eaten.
Pacific Ocean
Three hundred twenty thousand people were evacuated from the disaster zone - a thirty-kilometer zone. According to experts, the zone should have been much more expanded. Radioactive substances were discharged into the Pacific many times more than Chernobyl emissions. For the seventh year every day, three hundred tons of radioactive water has been received there from the reactor. Fukushima has infected the entire ocean, even North America finds Japanese radiation near its shores.
Canadians prove this by presenting caught irradiated fish. The ichthyofauna has already decreased by ten percent, even the herring in the North Pacific Ocean has disappeared. The level of radioactive iodine twenty days after the accident in western Canada was increased by three hundred percent, and it is still growing. In the United States (Oregon) , starfish began to lose their legs and disintegrate; they have been dying en masse since 2013, when radioactive waters got there too. The entire ocean ecosystem of the region is in jeopardy. The famous Oregon tuna has become radioactive. On California beaches, radiation rose by five hundred percent.
World silence
But not only the west coast of America suffered. Scientists talk about the infection of the entire oceans: the Pacific is currently up to ten times more radioactive than after the Second World War, when the United States tested its nuclear submarines there. However, Western politicians prefer not to say anything about the impact of the Fukushima tragedy. And everyone knows why.
The Japanese "Tepco" is a subsidiary, and the "daddy" here is General Electric, the largest company in the world that controls both politicians and the media. They can’t talk about Fukushima’s nuclear disaster from their hands.