Chernobyl Essay Research Paper The Chernobyl AccidentThe

Chernobyl Essay, Research Paper

The Chernobyl Accident

The Chernobyl Accident negatively affected not only the people of the Ukraine and surrounding countries; it also affected the economy, health and the environment.

The Disaster Occurs

On April 26th, 1986, something horribly went wrong with reactor four at the power plant in Chernobyl. This accident has so far been the worst one in the world s history of power plants. This accident was caused partly by the operator and partly by faults in the reactor construction. There was an experiment that was being done in order to investigate the possibility of making electricity from the residual energy in the turbo-generators, after the supply of steam was shut off. The experiment was poorly planned, and was led by an electrical engineer who wasn t familiar with the reactor facility. The operators broke six very important safety rules, and all shutdown systems were off-line. The emergency core cooling systems for the reactor had also been off-line. The experiment could only be completed while the reactor was low in power, something that led the operators to believe mistakenly that they were carrying out a safe operation. Just after 1:00am on April 26th, the reactor was operating at a low power level and all control rods

were withdrawn from the reactor core. The power output had been so low, the

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operators thought that they could control it manually. They overrode the

automatic control system so that the reactor wouldn t come to a halt. The power increase was slow at first, quickly increasing to a power doubling itself in less than one second. The water in the core exploded into steam. The fuel elements were destroyed by the blast, which also caused the roof of the reactor to blow away. That gave fresh air access to the reactor which fed the explosion. The fire lasted for several days releasing dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere. (Nils Bohmer)

Immediate Effects

The disaster killed 31 people immediately and caused about 500 other people to go to the hospital. Within a few days, people who lived 18.5 miles or closer were evacuated. The power of the explosion and fire carried most of the radioactivity away from the site, where it then spread across the Northern Hemisphere. The heaviest fallout descended on the western Soviet Union and parts of Europe.

Belarus was affected the most by the Chernobyl Accident. About 70 percent of all released substances from Chernobyl landed on its ground. More then 1.8 million people are sill living in heavy polluted areas. Less areas in Ukraine and Russia were heavily contaminated than in Belarus. However, agriculture still goes on in heavily polluted regions.

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Government Concealment

Shortly after this horrible accident, it became apparent that the USSR had intentionally concealed vital information for several reasons. They did so in order to prevent panic and opposition by downplaying the consequences to their own

population, to protect those in charge by hiding the truth, and to protect the nuclear industry. Some of the information concealed by the government is as follows. Six pages concerning radioactivity released in Belarus were removed from the official report. Physicians in Ukraine and Belarus were forbidden to mention radiation in their diagnoses. All health records of the liquidators of the consequences of the accident were missing. Also, appeals by private individuals in Belarus to children not to drink milk in the first week of May 1986 were stopped for fear they might cause panic. (Wisek)

Present Problems

Presently, many of the expected potential health effects of exposure to radiation have not yet become apparent because of the long latencies for some radiation-induced cancers. Only after several decades will the full effects of the accident come to an end. The heath problems that are being faced now are acute radiation sickness and burns to the skin from radioactivity to about 200 people, causing 28 deaths from acute radiation sickness, childhood thyroid cancer in children living in Belarus, the northern districts of the Ukraine and parts of the eastern border of the Russian Federation with Belarus and the Ukraine. So far

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nearly 500 cases of childhood thyroid cancer have been detected in a population of about 3 million at risk. Also, psychosocial effects from stress related conditions, through lifestyle changes, to near complete social disintegration of communities. It is estimated that 10 million people still live in the most affected regions. (Baverstock)

Between the years of 1981-1985, the average thyroid cancer rate was 4-6 incidents per million Ukrainian young children (birth to 15 years). After the accident, this number rose to 45 incidents per million. Researchers also found that 64 percent of all Ukrainian thyroid cancer patients age 15 or younger lived in the most contaminated regions (The provinces of Kiev, Chernigov, Zhitomir, Cherkassy, Rovno and the city of Kiev).

There have been significant increases in psychological health disorders and incidence such as, anxiety, depression, helplessness and despair leading to, social withdrawal and loss of hope for the future. Other disorders are attributable to mental stress. These psychological consequences were the result of the lack of p

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