April 26, 1986, 1:26:03am – fire alarm activated - The worst nuclear disaster in the world
Ukraine marked the 25th anniversary on Tuesday of the world's worst nuclear accident at its Chernobyl power plant as Japan pressed on with efforts to control the crisis at its Fukushima plant.
On April 26 1986, the No. 4 reactor at the Chernobyl plant, then in the Soviet Union, exploded and caught fire after a safety test experiment went badly wrong.
A total of 31 people died immediately but many more died of radiation-related sicknesses such as cancer, many of them in what is today Belarus.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich: "We have paid for the peace of the planet with the lives and health of thousands of compatriots. But not a single nation, even the most powerful, can overcome the consequences of a catastrophe of such a scale by itself," the leader said. "Chernobyl was a challenge of planetary dimensions. The answer to this challenge can be provided only by the world community”.
In the aftermath of the accident, 237 people suffered from acute radiation sickness, of whom 31 died within the first three months.Most of these were fire and rescue workers trying to bring the accident under control, who were not fully aware of how dangerous exposure to the radiation in the smoke was. Whereas, in the World Health Organization's 2006 report of the Chernobyl Forum expert group on the 237 emergency workers who were diagnosed with ARS, ARS was identified as the cause of death for 28 of these people within the first few months after the disaster. There were no further deaths identified, in the general population affected by the disaster, as being caused by ARS. Of the 72,000 Russian Emergency Workers being studied, 216 non-cancer deaths are attributed to the disaster, between 1991 and 1998. The latency period for solid cancers caused by excess radiation exposure is 10 or more years; thus at the time of the WHO report being undertaken, the rates of solid cancer deaths were no greater than the general population. Some 135,000 people were evacuated from the area, including 50,000 from Pripyat.
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