BBC visits Chernobyl ghost city
Digest more
In the weeks after the April 26, 1986, explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, it was difficult to get any information about the scope of the disaster, aside from terse announcements
3d
PHOTO ESSAY: AP photographer chronicles Chernobyl’s painful legacy of silence, sacrifice and danger
Efrem Lukatsky, a Kyiv-based photographer for The Associated Press, was living in the city on April 26, 1986, when the explosion and fire struck the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, about a two-hour drive away.
Photos of the infamous nuclear Chernobyl site show the abandoned power plant frozen in time — with a control panel still lit up ahead of the 40th anniversary of the unprecedented disaster.
In the early hours of 26 April 1986, Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded after a planned safety test went catastrophically wrong. The Chernobyl disaster was the result of a chain of critical errors — and its fallout was unprecedented.
Halyna Kharshenko went to work at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986, unaware of the scale and severity of the explosion that had just occurred. The next day, she had to be rushed to a hospital unit where the staff would only approach her in full protective gear.
Nikolay Solovyov was on shift the night of April 26, 1986 when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded."When people here say 'before the war' or 'after the war,' they mean April 26, 1986," he said.
Four decades ago, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded in the worst nuclear accident the world has ever seen. Today, some of the world’s leading nuclear experts warn Alex Croft that Russia’s act
Across the Chernobyl exclusion zone, Przewalski’s horses — stocky, sand-colored and almost toy-like in appearance — graze in a radioactive landscape larger than Luxembourg.
On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor melted down, but the rest of the world wouldn't learn how close it came to nuclear Armageddon until weeks later.
IMMEDIATELY after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, hundreds of thousands of “liquidators” were sent in to clear up after the catastrophic explosion. They charged straight into the