In the early hours of 26 April 1986 Leonid Toptunov, a young, inexperienced and tired operator at the Soviet nuclear plant at Chernobyl, near Kiev, allowed the level of reactivity in one of the plant’s reactors to fall dangerously low. As he attempted to correct this the power in the reactor rose dramatically and uncontrollably, meltdown of the reactor core occurred and a powerful steam explosion took place, closely followed by a massive second explosion of hydrogen, which started a hugh graphite fire and blew dozens of millions of curies of radioactivity into the environment. Radioactive eruption continued for ten days. So occurred the worst disaster in the history of nuclear energy.
In The Legacy of Chernobyl Zhores Medvedev, a former Soviet scientist now living and working in London. gives the first comprehensive analysis of the long-term global effects of the catastrophe, examining the technical, environmental, agricultural, health and economic impact of the largest industrial accident in human history. Officially it has been estimated to have cost the Soviet Union more than US$20 billion by 1989. and this is almost certainly an underestimate. More than 130,000 people were evacuated from the contaminated zone and permanently resettled. About 1.000.000 people continue to live under a regime of special radiological control and restrictions because their homes are in an area of very high radioactive contamination. More than 600,000 people, including 250,000 children, received high doses of radiation, and have been entered in a medical register for the rest of their lives, similar to the one set up for survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs in 1945. Nearly 3 million acres of agricultural and s lost for decades because of contamination with mdiocaesium, radiostrontium and plutonium.
Why did the catastrophe happen and what will be its egacy? Chernobyl’s implications for global energy production and the growing energy crisis in the USSR and Eastern Europe have contributed to a reconsideration of economic and political priorities in the Soviet Union and to perestroika and glasnost.
The Legacy of Chernobyl's informed by deep political and scientific knowledge, but remains the most accessible and readable account to date of the implications and resonances of a key event of modern times.