UN holidays - International Chernobyl Disaster Remembrance Day

The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which claimed many lives, occurred in Ukraine on April 26, 1986 In terms of the scale of damage to the environment, this man-made disaster is considered one of the worst in human history The population of Chernobyl was exposed to radiation that was 90 times higher than the level received in 1945 by the residents of Hiroshima after the explosion of the atomic bomb The consequences of the accident for people, flora and fauna of Ukraine and other countries were catastrophic and have not yet been completely overcome Therefore, the UN declared April 26 as the International Day of Remembrance of the Chernobyl Disaster In 1982, during the launch of the first power unit, the first accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant occurred And although there were no casualties, eliminating the consequences took about 3 months Four years later, testing of a turbogenerator began at Unit IV To do this, it was necessary to stop the nuclear reactor It was not possible to silence it, and on the night of April 26 at 1:23 am an explosion occurred The pump operator died from it In the morning, a second worker, an automation system adjustment engineer, died in the hospital from burns But the sacrifices did not end there At the time of the accident, there were about a thousand people near the reactor All of them received a radiation dose in the range of 2-20 Sieverts (4 Sieverts are lethal for humans) Liquidators totaling more than 500,000 people, arriving from all over the Soviet Union, also suffered The average dose of their radiation was several thousand roentgens (1 R is equal to 001 Sv) Many of them died from acute radiation sickness, cancer and other incurable diseases The fire at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl could not be extinguished for a long time, so it lasted almost 2 weeks During this time, about 190 tons of radioactive substances were released into the atmosphere The earthquake and tsunami that occurred in Japan in March 2011 destroyed 3 units of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant After the explosion, about 80% of harmful substances entered the sea The total release of cesium and iodine by Fukushima amounted to 15% of the volume of volatile gases from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant At Chernobyl, only one unit was damaged, but, unlike Fukushima, its core exploded, which led to the release of transuranium components into the atmosphere 200,000 km2 of land in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were polluted Later, traces of radiation were discovered in Norway, Sweden, Finland and in the Arctic regions that belonged to the USSR A photo chronicle of the tragedy was created by TASS correspondents V Zufarov and his Ukrainian colleague V Repik They arrived at the nuclear power plant in the first days after the accident to record details of the explosion The TASS reporter paid for the pictures with his premature death in 1996 According to the Moldovan correspondent V Demidetsky, the city of Pripyat, where the station workers lived, after the emergency evacuation began to resemble the zone from A Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker” Domestic and foreign filmmakers have made more than 5,000 documentaries about the nuclear reactor accident One of them, “The Bell of Chernobyl,” contains footage of A Pugacheva’s concert, which the singer gave near Pripyat in 1986 The first feature film about the disaster was “Disintegration” in 1990 with S Shakurov in the title role Later, in 1991, Anthony Page filmed "Chernobyl The Last Warning", S Aranovich - "Year of the Dog" 1994 with I Churikova and I Skalar, O Bayrak - "Aurora" 2006 with D Kharatyan and E Roberts The realities of life and the chronicle of the accident are objectively reflected in the series “Chernobyl” by the American company HBO, released in 2019 The film received 87 awards at various awards and festivals, incl such as “Golden Globe”, “Grammy”, etc The accuracy of the presentation of events, the acting, the skill of the director, screenwriter and stage director were also appreciated by the Russian audience Periodically addressing the topic of the Chernobyl tragedy helps to rethink past events and answer the questions: “Was it possible to avoid so many victims?”, “How to prevent similar disasters in the future?” Therefore, every year on April 26, people around the world remember the Chernobyl accident on the International Day of Remembrance of the Chernobyl Disaster