Chernobyl airs every Monday on HBO and Tuesdays on Sky Atlantic. Reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded at 1.26am on Saturday, April 26, 1986, which nearly brought Europe to the brink of extinction. The plant itself was run by authorities in Moscow, so the Ukrainian government – which was under the rule of the Soviet Union at the time – had to wait on orders from Moscow. Mikhail Gorbachev was the Soviet leader at the time. Here’s a look at how the Soviet Government immediately responded.
Immediate reaction
Due to the ramifications of the Cold War and tensions with the West, the Soviet Union tried to keep the Chernobyl disaster a secret.
This meant immediately closing the borders and enforcing a media blackout.
As portrayed in Chernobyl on HBO and Sky Atlantic, immediately the Soviets were in denial.
Anatoly Dyatlov (played by Paul Ritter), who was the deputy chief-engineer and the supervisor at the time of the disaster refused to accept that the core had exploded, despite evidence pointing to high-level radiation levels and staff visiting reactor number four.
In the immediate aftermath, firefighters were sent to extinguish the fire to protect reactor number three and to keep the core cooling systems intact.
By 6.35am the surrounding fires were put out except for the contained the fire inside reactor number four which burned for days.
However, they were unaware of how dangerously radiative the smoke and debris were.
The official Soviet recording puts the death toll at 31, however, the real amount is thought to be in the thousands, if not millions.
Estimates range from 4,000 to 27,000 by the Union of Concerned Scientists, whereas Greenpeace estimates that between 93,000 – 200,000 people died as a result of the disaster.
WHY DID THEY USE BORON AND SAND AT CHERNOBYL?
Chernobyl airs Mondays on HBO and Tuesdays on Sky Atlantic (Image: HBO)
Commission and Evacuation
After several figures played down the scale of the explosion, a commission headed by the deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR was formed.
The commission as headed by Valery Legasov (played by Jared Harris), who was the First Deputy Director of Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy alongside nuclear specialist Evgeny Velikhov and many others.
They arrived at the Chernobyl power plant on April 26, by which time two plant workers had died and 52 firefighters were in the hospital with Acute Radiation Syndrome.
Speaking to press in London, including Express.co.uk, showrunner Craig Mazin explained how children in Germany were not allowed outside once the radiation had been detected, yet those in Pripyat, the town of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, were oblivious to the disaster.
After Legasov and his staff uncovered evidence of the destroyed reactor and terrifying levels of radiation, only then Pripyat was evacuated.
The Soviet authorities did not evacuate the town of Pripyat and set up an exclusion zone until 36 hours after the explosion.
All 50,000 people living in the nearby town of Pripyat were evacuated.
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The Soviet Government did not tell the truth about Chernobyl at first (Image: HBO)
Accepting Chernobyl and the West
The Soviet Government denied that anything had occurred at the power plant, despite numerous calls being made from the East and West about radiation.
The truth could not be hidden from the West after a Swedish power plant (over 1,000km away) was able to trace levels of radiation in the air from Chernobyl.
Two days after the explosion (Monday, April 28), high levels of radiation were detected at Forsmark Nuclear Power Station in Sweden.
Radiation from Chernobyl was then detected in Denmark, Finland and Norway.
Stellan Skarsgård, who plays, Boris Shcherbina, said: “I knew a lot about it, Sweden was the first country to recognise that something had happened there.
“It was a Swedish nuclear plant that found radiation and traced back to the fuel at Chernobyl and the way it came in over Sweden, we couldn’t eat reindeer for a couple of years and we had to eat mushrooms and stuff. It had an impact there as well as here [UK] and Ireland as well.”
He added: “But what I wasn’t familiar with, what I found really interesting in this story, is that it describes how a system that considers itself perfect is prone to start hiding truths that are not comfortable and it is always lethal and it could be the Soviet system or it could be the religious ideology or anything that is supposed to be perfect, it is dangerous.”
Soon afterwards, on April 28 the Soviet government confirmed there had been an accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear power plant, on the TV news programme Vremya.
The news was soon picked up by global outlets and the news travelled fast.
Emily Watson who plays fictional scientist Ulana Khomyuk who represents those who challenged the USSR’s version of events added: “To me, she is a truth ninja.
“She is given the job when the guys are cleaning up the mess, she is on the hunt for information and she starts hitting brick walls and it’s dangerous and I loved her because she was a person who took on the system and said, ‘I am not going to be afraid, I am going to push until this gets through’.”
She added: “It could have been so worse. It’s about control of truth, it’s about the control of information. It is involved in everything we are doing right now.”
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Jarred Harris plays Valery Legasov in Chernobyl (Image: HBO)
Boron, Sand and a steam explosion
Boron and sand were used to try to stop the fire at nuclear reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
The mixture was dropped on reactor number four from above.
The fire was a “nuclear-fission” reaction, where the uranium atoms are continuously releasing more energy, allowing the fire to continuously burn.
Boron was used as it is a neutron absorbing chemical element.
As a result, liquid-like lava had started to form due to the graphite that had exploded, the boron and sand that had been dropped on top alongside fuel, concrete, water and other materials present in nuclear reactor four.
If this had burned through the reactor floor and into the pools of water, it may have got an even bigger steam explosion, sending more radioactivity across Europe.
The only way to prevent this was for the sluice gates to opened by hand.
Three volunteers – engineers Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bezpalov and shift supervisor Boris Baranov – dived under and successfully managed to open the sluice gates, preventing the explosion.
Liquidators
To clean up the radioactive debris, liquidators – firefighters, members of The Red Army, medical personnel, Soviet Air Force, scientists, engineers – were employed from all over the Soviet Union.
The World Health Organisation estimates that 240,000 recovery workers were called upon in 1986 and 1987 alone and 600,000 overall.
David Marples in his book Chernobyl: The Decade of Despair, estimated that 6,000 of the liquidators died as a result of the long-term health complications following Chernobyl.
Chernobyl airs Mondays on HBO and Tuesdays on Sky Atlantic
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