CATASTROPHE AT CHERNOBYL

WHAT IS CATASTROPHE?

•An event producing a subversion of the order or system of things; a final event, usually of a calamitous or disastrous nature; hence, sudden calamity; great misfortune.

•A violent and widely extended change in the surface of the earth, as, an elevation or subsidence of some part of it, effected by internal causes.

•A sudden disaster which destroys a lot of thing and brings pity on people

•A tragic and sudden event of the greatest severity, usually on large scale

CHERNOBYL at a end

•Occurred on 26 April 1986 at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine.

•An explosion and fire released large quantities of radioactive

•contamination into the atmosphere, which spread over much

•of Western USSR and Europe.

•All of the safety precautions were taken offline during• a test, which attests to the ignorance of the operators.

•When a series of things went wrong, there was nothing •to keep a chain reaction from going off.

•The accident is widely accepted as the worst nuclear •disaster in history

• Located 11 miles north of the city of Chernobyl• Plant consisted of 4 reactors• Produced 10% of Ukraine’s electricity• Construction began in the 1970’s• Reactor #4 was completed in 1983• At the time of the accident, reactors #5 and #6 were

in progress.

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant

Saturday, April 26, 1986:

-Reactor #4 was undergoing a test to test the backup power supply in case of a power loss. -The power fell too low, allowing the concentration of xenon-135 to rise.

-The workers continued the test, and in order to control the rising levels of xenon-135, the control rods were pulled out.

What happened?

After the explosion, most of the plant is still standing. Some might think from this picture that the disaster wasn’t all that bad, but what makes the Chernobyl disaster the worst in history is the sheer volume of radioactive materials that where spewed across the European continent.

The Reactor After the Explosion

Radioactivity• As the map shows, the

explosion and the resulting radioactive contamination affected a large area of Europe, not just around where the accident happened.

• Workers at a Swedish nuclear power plant were found to have radioactive particles on their clothes, and after it was determined that the Swedish reactor had no leak, the news of a widespread problem reached mainstream news.

Evacuation-Following the accident hundreds of thousands of people had to be evacuated and between 1990 and 1995 an additional 210,000 people were resettled.

People evacuated:-May 2-3 (1 week later)

10 km area (45,000 people)

-May 4 30 km area (116,000

people)-50,000 people from Pripyat, Ukraine were evacuated 2 days after the accident.

CAUSES

Lack of knowledge of nuclear physics and engineering, as well as lack of experience and training.

A more significant flaw was in the design of the control rods that are inserted into the reactor to slow down the reaction.

Lacking a containment vessel. Operating instructions and design deficiencies found

Impact on People203 people were hospitalized immediately. 31 of

them eventually died. Most of these people were workers in the plant or local firefighters.

Evacuation of people from the affected zones.o Radiation/Health Impact Increase in incidence of cancer and leukemia. Increase in congenital birth deformities. Increase in suicide in the contaminated zones. Increase in risk to mental health.o Psychological Impact People have been led to think of themselves as

victims over the years, and are therefore more apt to take a passive approach toward their future rather than developing a system of self-sufficiency.

Impact on People

oEconomic impactRemoval of radiation affected agricultural and forest land from production.Hugh amount of money in Belarus and Ukraine used for Chernobyl related benefits .Agricultural production costs have increased due to the need for special cultivation techniques, fertilizers and additives.Apart from the 57 direct deaths in the accident itself, 4,000 additional cancer cases due to the accident have been predicted.Many other consequences of the disaster such as groundwater contamination and birth defects have been documented, but there is no real way to know the extent of the damage that the Chernobyl disaster caused.

Lessons learned from Chernobyl The scale of the material and the financial losses in mitigating

the consequences of the Chernobyl accident provide compelling evidence of the extremely high price of errors and shortcomings when ensuring the safety of nuclear power plants and of the need for strict compliance with international safety requirements during their design, construction and operation.

The cost of ensuring the safety of nuclear facilities is significantly lower than that of dealing with accident consequences. Large-scale man-made accidents cause great social and economic damage to countries located in their area of influence. Hundreds of billions of US dollars’ worth of direct and indirect damages have been reported by Belarus, Russia and Ukraine as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident over the past 20 years.

People and places to remember

Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union when the disaster happened. This means that he was the leader of the Soviet Union at the time. Many people blamed him directly for the explosion but he said that the military leaders prevented him from knowing of the disaster until later. During the time of his leadership before the explosion, reforms were being made, but at a slow pace. Historians believe that because of the Chernobyl nuclear explosion, many reforms were made in Soviet Russia because a large public outcry reached Gorbachev after the rest of the country found out about it.

Valeri Legasov

• Valeri Legasov was the chief of the investigation committee of the Chernobyl Disaster. He made the decisions that prevented larger explosions from taking place and spoke to the governments, as well as his fellow scientist and the press, about the accident.

• Soviet government was uncomfortable because he was so open about the accident and never recognized his contribution.

• He became ill because of the radiation he was exposed to, and suffered from depression over his lack of recognition. He committed suicide on the second anniversary of the disaster.

Mohammad ElBaradei

• Mohammad ElBaradei is the current director of the International Atomic Energy Association. He was the director when the IAEA report on the Chernobyl disaster was released in 2005. That report is the most respected report on the disaster.

• It attributed 56 direct deaths and estimated that there may be 4,000 extra deaths due to cancer among the approximately 600,000 most highly exposed and 5,000 among the 6 million living nearby.

Chernobyl Memorials

A memorial to the firefighters who died

after trying to stop the fires that engulfed the

plant. They weren’t even told there was radioactivity.

A memorial to all of those who died at Chernobyl

MADE BY-SHUBHAMCLASS-8BROLL NO.-9461/27