By 2001, that rate had dropped to roughly 800 roentgens per hour. In the 1980s, the Elephant’s Foot gave off an estimated 10,000 roentgens of radiation each hour, enough to kill a person three feet away in less than two minutes. The mass was named for its wrinkled appearance, which reminded some observers of the wrinkled skin of an elephant’s leg and foot. (Credit: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images) Chernobyl Elephant’s Footĭeep within the basement of Reactor 4 lies the Chernobyl Elephant’s Foot, a huge mass of melted concrete, sand and highly radioactive nuclear fuel. The Elephants Foot of the Chernobyl disaster. Three days later, Soviet May Day parades to celebrate workers went ahead as usual in Moscow, Kiev and Belarus’ capital Minsk-even as hazardous amounts of radiation were still streaming from the wrecked power plant.
nuclear accident at Three Mile Island and other nuclear incidents in western countries. The statement was followed by a state broadcast detailing the U.S. The Soviet government made no official statement about the global-scale accident until Swedish leaders demanded an explanation when operators of a nuclear power plant in Stockholm registered unusually high radiation levels near their plant.įinally, on April 28, the Kremlin reported that there had been an accident at Chernobyl and that authorities were handling it. It took days for Soviet leadership to inform the international community that the disaster had occurred. Residents were told they would be away for just a few days, so they took very little with them. It wasn’t until the next day, April 27, when the government began evacuations of Pripyat’s 50,000 residents. Aside from the sight of trucks cleaning the streets with foam, there were initially few signs of the disaster unfolding just miles away.
Meanwhile, life went on as usual for almost a day in the neighboring town of Pripyat. The meltdown and its aftermath drained the Soviet Union of billions in clean-up costs, led to the loss of a primary energy source and dealt a serious blow to national pride. The Chernobyl disaster not only stoked fears over the dangers of nuclear power, it also exposed the Soviet government’s lack of openness to the Soviet people and the international community.
Eventually, thousands of people would show signs of health effects-including cancer-from the fallout. The worst nuclear disaster in history killed two workers in the explosions and, within months, at least 28 more would be dead by acute radiation exposure. A routine test at the power plant went horribly wrong, and two massive explosions blew the 1,000-ton roof off one of the plant’s reactors, releasing 400 times more radiation than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Chernobyl is a nuclear power plant in Ukraine that was the site of a disastrous nuclear accident on April 26, 1986.
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