The Chernobyl nuclear power plant has been captured by Russian forces, an adviser to the Ukrainian presidential office, Mykhailo Podolyak, said on Thursday.
“It is impossible to say the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is safe after a totally pointless attack by the Russians,” he said.
“This is one of the most serious threats in Europe today,” Podolyak said.
Chernobyl was the site of one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters, which occurred early on the morning of April 26, 1986. Then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev would later state that the disaster helped precipitate the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, largely due to the expenses incurred, both socially and economically.
A botched safety test in one of nuclear reactors resulted in the core’s explosion, sending deadly radiation into the atmosphere. The Soviet Union had initially tried to conceal the disaster from the world, but radiation from the open reactor core spread to other parts of Europe, exposing the disaster’s severity.
It resulted in the immediate evacuation of the nearest city to the plant, Pripyat (where 60,000 people resided), and the establishment of a 30 kilometer exclusion zone around the facility due to high radiation levels. More than 300,000 people were evacuated.
More than 600,000 Soviet residents participated in the costly cleanup effort. Untold numbers of people suffered from cancer and other radiation illnesses; the exact death toll from Chernobyl is unknown, but the official number provided by Soviet authorities stood at just 31 people.
The exposed reactor core — still dangerously radioactive — was covered with a makeshift concrete/steel sarcophagus, which itself was later covered by the New Safe Confinement, completed in 2017 at a cost of $2 billion.
With reporting by Robert Pozarycki
