April 26, 2018. April 29, 1986: Spy satellite photos provide U.S. officials with their first glimpse of the devastation wrought by the Chernobyl disaster. 4 is still intact. Firefighters light candles to commemorate their fallen brethren at the monument to Chernobyl victims in Slavutich, the city of the power station’s personnel live, about 30 miles from the nuclear plant. a. Chernobyl is the well-known Russian name for the site; Chornobyl is preferred by Ukraine. Today, it’s mostly animals and not humans that roam the Chernobyl exclusion zone. April 25, 1986, 1 a.m.: Chernobyl’s operators begin reducing power at reactor No. “They couldn’t get shoes on him because his feet had swelled up,” she recalled. That’s what U.N. agencies found, at least. Chernobyl is the gripping new HBO drama people are rating higher than Game of Thrones. Less than two weeks after the infamous reactor meltdown at Chernobyl, officials decided to risk the lives of three men to potentially save millions of lives. Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesDisabled children in the cafeteria at the Vesnova Home for Invalid Children, 2016. The goal was to see if the power generated from steam turbines could be effectively transferred to backup generators. Sputnik/RIAVasily Ignatenko was 25 years old when he died of radiation. When the flow of water coolant decreased and the turbines slowed down, all data pointed in the right direction: The reactor’s energy output rose as expected. March 1, 1990. Adam Nagaitis portrayed the real-life Ignatenko as an everyday Soviet fireman of the time. A staff writer for All That’s Interesting, Marco Margaritoff has also published work at outlets including People, VICE, and Complex, covering everything from film to finance to technology. In what at first appeared to be a genre-heavy exercise in shock and awe, the show has successfully served as a heavily informative, visual novel, of sorts. The temperature of the air 200 m above the reactor was between 120° and 200°C for many days afterwards, the core melting into a type of ‘magma’, which melted the fuel rods and stubbornly defied attempts to extinguish it. As a result, a huge concrete system filled with pipes and special equipment was mounted under the reactor. April 27, 1986, 10 a.m.: Helicopters begin dumping sand, clay, boron, lead and dolomite into the burning core in an attempt to slow radioactive emissions. Vasily Ignatenko was 25 years old when he died of radiation. Notes & references Notes. No it is not. The last time she saw her husband, he was lying dead on a slab in a Moscow morgue. This is where he received his lethal dose of radiation and died at 25. April 26, 1986, 1:23:58 a.m.: The first explosion, to be quickly followed by at least one more, blows the 1,000-ton roof right off the reactor and shoots a fireball high into the night sky. A safety test, which took place on April 26, 1986, at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, was deemed so routine that the plant’s director didn’t even bother showing up. April 26, 1986, 1 a.m.: The power stabilizes, albeit at a lower than preferred level, and plant supervisors order the test to proceed. It was this attempt to extinguish the open-air graphite fires atop that gave Ignatenko his lethal dose of radiation. View of the Chernobyl plant after the explosion. Amazing un-seen photos from the Chernobyl disaster (Page 5) The residents of Pripyat knew there had been an accident, but had no idea how severe it was, and went about their day as usual on the Saturday of the 26th. Not humans that roam the Chernobyl miners faced certain death to dig a tunnel at which the reactor that exploded! 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