Ep. 8: Chernobyl

By: Carrie Gibson

Length: 28 mins

Publisher's summary

On 26th April 1986 a series of explosions at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant sent radioactive material drifting across the Soviet Union and beyond. Lyubov Kovalevskaya, was in Chernobyl that day tells her story.

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Heartbreaking

On April 26, 1986 the nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant occurred. This disaster led to the release of 400x more radioactive materials than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.

There was a lot about this nuclear disaster that I didn’t know about. This disaster started as an experiment to see how long a turbine would supply power to the reactor in the vent of power being lost. Unfortunately, they shut off all safety procedures before the test because this had hindered previous tests for the same thing. I didn’t realize that this disaster started as an experiment that went wrong.

I think one of things that surprises me the most about this disaster was that the local town of Pripyat, or the world, was not notified about the disaster. They didn’t even evacuate the town until the next day. The world didn’t know anything until April 28th when the radiation cloud was noticed by Sweden. I can’t believe a country wouldn’t notify its people about such a deadly disaster.

This episode interviews Lyubov Kovalevskaya, who was a journalist. She uncovered dangerous design flaws at Chernobyl and published about them in early 1986 but was ignored. She gives her account (translated) of what happened that day in Pripyat, and what happened afterwards. She even went back after being evacuated to collect accounts from others about the events that happened and any other evidence she could find. She had to send scans of the documents to anti-nuclear movements in Germany and sympathetic magazines in France just to get some of the truth out.

Lyubov’s account of what happened to her and her family is heartbreaking. She talks about her daughter, who suffered greatly from radiation, and how she can’t take care of herself. What is even worse is that she put her health at risk to gather evidence against nuclear power and it is still being used today. You can just hear the heartbreak in her voice because this will probably happen again.

Great series

I've really enjoyed listening to this series. The events highlighted range from famous to obscure and each is illuminating in its own way about the state of the current world.