History UsefulNotes / Chernobyl

* ''WesternAnimation/SpidermanTheAnimatedSeries'': In part two of ''The Six Forgotten Warriors'' arc, the BigBad has a base of operations beneath the power plant. Inevitably, Spidey, Silver Sable and her mercs, Kingpin and the Sinister Six all end up outside as the base was falling apart around them. Just as it looks like another fight is about to start, Silver Sable quickly points out that it'd be a waste of time and to look around them, which is when they all take notice of their surroundings. [[DumbMuscle Rhino]] doesn't see what the big deal is, Kingpin is nonplussed, while Scorpion, Vulture and Doc Ock are having a collective OhCrap. [[note]]In the comics, Doc Ock is explicitly a nuclear physicist, so he of all people would understand the danger they are in.[[/note]] The prospect of radiation poisoning steers both teams to call it a draw and leave pronto.

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* HiroshimaAsAUnitOfMeasure: Reactor meltdown about to happen in your story? Use "X" Chernobyls to describe how bad it's going to get. Within the TV Series ''Series/{{Chernobyl}}'', the Hiroshima bomb is used as a unit by Legasov to hammer home just how bad the situation is: "The fire we're watching with our own eyes is giving off nearly twice the radiation released by the bomb in Hiroshima. And that's ''every single hour''. Hour after hour, 20 hours since the explosion, so 40 bombs worth by now. Forty-eight more tomorrow. And it ''will not stop''. Not in a week, not in a month. It will burn and spread its poison until '''the entire continent is dead!'''".

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The disaster, which happened on April 26, 1986 at 01:23 am Moscow time, was the result of [[DisasterDominoes several factors]]. The RBMK reactor designs used in Soviet plants were inherently flawed in two ways; firstly, if the connection to the main electrical grid was lost, the reactor's cooling systems would lose power, and the diesel-powered backup generators would take over a minute to provide sufficient power to cool the reactor, which could lead to a meltdown in the interim. Secondly, the reactor could heat up very quickly and had an (unknown to its operators and most nuclear scientists, thanks to the state suppressing the information after it was discovered in 1983) tendency to surge power levels when a SCRAM (AZ-5) button was pressed to stop the reaction. Reactor #4 (the newest of Chernobyl's reactors and the one in which the accident occurred), like all [=RBMKs=] had a strong containment structure on the side, but not on its roof.[[note]]They weren't included in the design, as (although theoretically possible) it would have been prohibitively expensive for a reactor as bulky as the RBMK. Not that a full containment structure would have survived the explosion -- the less violent Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011 was still enough to completely destroy the containment structures at that plant -- but it would have at least absorbed enough of the explosion to limit the fallout to a much smaller area.[[/note]] The plant personnel were also carrying out a dangerous test with Reactor #4 for power outage protocols at night (since they didn't want to interfere with citizens' electricity usage) with inexperienced workers. [[note]]The test was originally scheduled for earlier in the day, but Kyiv's power grid controller asked for a delay due to end of month power requirements requiring the plant remain at 1600MW power for longer than it was supposed to, which led to a build up of xenon in the reactor that did not go away when the test got underway 11 hours later. By then, a shift change had occurred, and the experienced reactor operators were relieved by less experienced personnel not familiar with the test protocols.[[/note]]

The test involved reducing the reactor's power to 700MW in order to simulate a blackout, and see if this was sufficient to power the cooling systems until the diesel generators could kick in. However, the reactor core had been "poisoned" by a build-up of xenon gas due to a delay in the test, causing the power to start dropping below the desired figure. Then, due to what has been variously attributed to either an error on the part of the inexperienced reactor operator, Leonid Toptunov, or a malfunction caused by the reactor systems not knowing how to handle operation with such high xenon levels, an attempt to stabilize the power level had the opposite effect and resulted in the reactor crashing down to a mere 30MW. By all rights the test should have been abandoned at this point, as it would have taken a whole day for the xenon to decay away. The test's supervisor, Anatoly Dyatlov insisted on trying to continue, however, and despite his best efforts, Toptunov was only able to restore the reactor to 200MW, which Dyatlov figured was still good enough to continue (the RBMK was notoriously unstable at low power levels, but operating it at such a low level ''technically'' wasn't against regulations).

As this was still during the years of the Soviet Union, and UsefulNotes/MikhailGorbachev had only been in office for a year at this point, news about the disaster was slow to come out. The day after the disaster the people in the nearby company town of Pripyat were just minding their own business as usual, and it was not until the second day that action was actually taken: the government forces showed up at Pripyat and told everybody to pack only their essentials (they claimed the citizens of Pripyat could return later) and evacuate immediately. The radiation spread through Belarus, and the Kremlin remained tight-lipped. Then it spread to the Baltic states, and the Kremlin remained tight-lipped. Then the radiation reached the Capitalist bloc in Sweden... and that's where the cat got out of the bag and the Soviet Union had to admit that the accident happened. The international reaction led to a halt of almost all nuclear reactor development worldwide, with some (such as Italy) going so far as to close down their nuclear plants. Many neighboring areas to the plant were made instantly unsafe for habitation, with a 30 km Exclusion Zone established, with cities in the zone (most notably Pripyat, the city where workers of the plant lived) remaining ghost towns to this day.

Containment cost the Soviet Union 18 billion rubles,[[note]]The Soviet ruble was on a 1:1 exchange rate with the United States dollar at the time; adjusted for inflation, this would be roughly USD $39 billion in 2015[[/note]] and has cost hundreds of billions of dollars in containment and treatment since. The disaster was also a major factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 -- the immense cost of cleanup[[note]]not to mention the Afghanistan War was still going on at the time and was itself a huge drain and cost for the Soviet government[[/note]], the fact that attempting to cover up the incident only made it worse, Valery Legasov's testimony and his tapes coming to light after his suicide, the human toll of the disaster and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's push for more openness to the world (his ''glasnost'' policy) all cascaded and led to the superpower dissolving five years after the incident. The Chernobyl disaster led to 31 immediate deaths, with cancer deaths in Soviet Union estimated to be in the ''thousands'', and estimations vary ''wildly'' on the effects and number of deaths the radioactive cloud caused throughout Europe (via thyroid cancers most notably). Cow milk in some parts of Ukraine still had ''five times'' the safe level of radiations as of the early 2020s.

On February 24, 2022, the first day of that year's mass scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, elements of the [[UsefulNotes/RussiansWithRustingRockets Russian army]] captured the Chernobyl exclusion zone and nuclear power plant, disturbing the rotation of the staff working on the decommissioning. The Russians would occupy the area for about a month. Against the warnings of the Chernobyl decommissioning staff, Russian forces took to using the Red Forest -- still one of the most contaminated areas in the exclusion zone -- as a route for convoys involved in the offensive against Kyiv. The resulting foot and vehicle traffic, as well as the digging of trenches, churned up large amounts of radioactive dust that gave a number of Russian soldiers radiation sickness -- to all appearances giving the impression that years of Russian revisionist history left ''none'' of the Russian personnel with just how bad of an idea casually wandering through the area was, or prepared to accept the mentioned dire warnings. Russian forces began to withdraw from the Kyiv area after failing to take the capital and amidst the recapturing of territory by the Ukrainian army; Russian troops were reported to have left the Chernobyl nuclear power plant by April 1. The threat of another nuclear disaster has since been looming at another plant, that of Zaporizhzhia, in and around which Russian occupiers have installed weaponry.

On February 24, 2022, the first day of that year's mass scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, elements of the [[UsefulNotes/RussiansWithRustingRockets Russian army]] captured the Chernobyl exclusion zone and nuclear power plant, disturbing the rotation of the staff working on the decommissioning. The Russians would occupy the area for about a month. Against the warnings of the Chernobyl decommissioning staff, Russian forces took to using the Red Forest -- still one of the most contaminated areas in the exclusion zone -- as a route for convoys involved in the offensive against Kyiv. The resulting foot and vehicle traffic, as well as the digging of trenches, churned up large amounts of radioactive dust that gave a number of Russian soldiers radiation sickness. Russian forces began to withdraw from the Kyiv area after failing to take the capital and amidst the recapturing of territory by the Ukrainian army; Russian troops were reported to have left the Chernobyl nuclear power plant by April 1. The threat of another nuclear disaster has since been looming at another plant, that of Zaporizhzhia, in and around which Russian occupiers have installed weaponry.

* ClassifiedInformation
** The fault with the control rods had already been identified after an accident in a Leningrad RBMK reactor in 1975. Recommendations were made on how to correct the fault, but because news of the Leningrad accident was suppressed ''no-one knew why these recommended changes were important'', meaning they weren't prioritized and the plant operators weren't warned of the dangers of [=SCRAMing=] the reactor.

** ''S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl''. Titled "Chornobyl" after the Ukrainian transliteration due to a reject of the Russian transliteration following the mass Russian invasion that started in 2022.

The site of what is often regarded as the worst disaster in nuclear power history, the Chernobyl (Chornobyl in Ukrainian transliteration to English) V.I. Lenin Memorial Power Plant was one of the [[UsefulNotes/SovietRussiaUkraineAndSoOn Soviet Union]]'s biggest and most modern nuclear plants, designed to give power to the city of Kyiv/Kiev[[note]]"Kiev" is the transliteration from Russian to English, while "Kyiv" is the transliteration from Ukrainian to English. Nowadays, most Ukrainians don't like "Kiev" being used, especially since the full scale Russian invasion.[[/note]], Ukrainian SSR (now UsefulNotes/{{Ukraine}}). The disaster was the first accident to score a 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, its highest rating (the only other with this rating is the Fukushima Daiichi disaster of 2011), and surrounding areas remain uninhabitable to this day.

Containment cost the Soviet Union 18 billion rubles,[[note]]The Soviet ruble was on a 1:1 exchange rate with the United States dollar at the time; adjusted for inflation, this would be roughly USD $39 billion in 2015[[/note]] and has cost hundreds of billions of dollars in containment and treatment since. The disaster was also a major factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 -- the immense cost of cleanup[[note]]not to mention the Afghanistan War was still going on at the time and was itself a huge drain and cost for the Soviet government[[/note]], the fact that attempting to cover up the incident only made it worse, Valery Legasov's testimony and his tapes coming to light after his suicide, the human toll of the disaster and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's push for more openness to the world (his ''glasnost'' policy) all cascaded and led to the superpower dissolving five years after the incident. The Chernobyl disaster led to 31 immediate deaths, with cancer deaths in Soviet Union estimated to be in the ''thousands'', and estimations vary ''wildly'' on the effects and number of deaths the radioactive cloud caused throughout Europe (via thyroid cancers most notably). Cow milk in some parts of Ukraine still has ''five times'' the safe level of radiations as of 2019.

On February 24, 2022, the first day of that year's invasion of Ukraine by Russia, elements of the [[UsefulNotes/RussiansWithRustingRockets Russian army]] captured the Chernobyl exclusion zone and nuclear power plant, disturbing the rotation of the staff working on the decommissioning. The Russians would occupy the area for about a month. Against the warnings of the Chernobyl decommissioning staff, Russian forces took to using the Red Forest -- still one of the most contaminated areas in the exclusion zone -- as a route for convoys involved in the offensive against Kyiv. The resulting foot and vehicle traffic, as well as the digging of trenches, churned up large amounts of radioactive dust that gave a number of Russian soldiers radiation sickness. Russian forces began to withdraw from the Kyiv area after failing to take the capital and amidst the recapturing of territory by the Ukrainian army; Russian troops were reported to have left the Chernobyl nuclear power plant by April 1. The threat of another nuclear disaster has since been looming at another plant, that of Zaporizhzhia, in and around which Russian occupiers have installed weaponry.

The site of what is often regarded as the worst disaster in nuclear power history, the Chernobyl (AKA Chornobyl or V.I. Lenin Memorial) Nuclear Power Plant was one of the [[UsefulNotes/SovietRussiaUkraineAndSoOn Soviet Union]]'s biggest and most modern nuclear plants, designed to give power to the city of Kyiv / Kiev[[note]]"Kiev" is the transliteration from Russian to English, while "Kyiv" is the transliteration from Ukrainian to English. Nowadays, most Ukrainians don't like "Kiev" being used.[[/note]], Ukrainian SSR (now {{UsefulNotes/Ukraine}}). The disaster was the first accident to score a 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, its highest rating (the only other with this rating is the Fukushima Daiichi disaster of 2011), and surrounding areas remain uninhabitable to this day.

The disaster, which happened on April 26, 1986 at 01:23 am Moscow time, was the result of [[DisasterDominoes several factors]]. The RBMK reactor designs used in Soviet plants were inherently flawed in two ways; firstly, if the connection to the main electrical grid was lost, the reactor's cooling systems would lose power, and the diesel-powered backup generators would take over a minute to provide sufficient power to cool the reactor, which could lead to a meltdown in the interim. Secondly, the reactor could heat up very quickly and had an (unknown to its operators and most nuclear scientists, thanks to the state suppressing the information after it was discovered in 1983) tendency to surge power levels when a SCRAM (AZ-5) button was pressed to stop the reaction. Reactor #4 (the newest of Chernobyl's reactors and the one in which the accident occurred), like all [=RBMKs=] had a strong containment structure on the side, but not on its roof.[[note]](They weren't included in the design, as it would have been prohibitively expensive for a reactor as bulky as the RBMK. Not that a full containment structure would have survived the explosion -- the less violent Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011 was still enough to completely destroy the containment structures at that plant -- but it would have at least absorbed enough of the explosion to limit the fallout to a much smaller area)[[/note]] The plant personnel were also carrying out a dangerous test with Reactor #4 for power outage protocols at night (since they didn't want to interfere with citizens' electricity usage) with inexperienced workers. [[note]]The test was originally scheduled for earlier in the day, but Kyiv's power grid controller asked for a delay due to end of month power requirements requiring the plant remain at 1600MW power for longer than it was supposed to, which led to a build up of xenon in the reactor that did not go away when the test got underway 11 hours later. By then, a shift change had occurred, and the experienced reactor operators were relieved by less experienced personnel not familiar with the test protocols.[[/note]]

The site of what is often regarded as the worst disaster in nuclear power history, the Chernobyl (AKA Chornobyl or V.I. Lenin Memorial) Nuclear Power Plant was one of the UsefulNotes/SovietUnion's biggest and most modern nuclear plants, designed to give power to the city of Kyiv / Kiev[[note]]"Kiev" is the transliteration from Russian to English, while "Kyiv" is the transliteration from Ukrainian to English. Nowadays, most Ukrainians don't like "Kiev" being used.[[/note]], Ukrainian SSR (now {{UsefulNotes/Ukraine}}). The disaster was the first accident to score a 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, its highest rating (the only other with this rating is the Fukushima Daiichi disaster of 2011), and surrounding areas remain uninhabitable to this day.

The site of what is often regarded as the worst disaster in nuclear power history, the Chernobyl (AKA Chornobyl or V.I. Lenin Memorial) Nuclear Power Plant was one of the UsefulNotes/SovietUnion's biggest and most modern nuclear plants, designed to give power to the city of Kyiv / Kiev[[note]]"Kiev" is the transliteration from Russian to English, while "Kyiv" is the transliteration from Ukrainian to English. Nowadays, most Ukrainians ''[[BerserkButton don't like]]'' "Kiev" being used.[[/note]], Ukrainian SSR (now {{UsefulNotes/Ukraine}}). The disaster was the first accident to score a 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, its highest rating (the only other with this rating is the Fukushima Daiichi disaster of 2011), and surrounding areas remain uninhabitable to this day.

The site of what is often regarded as the worst disaster in nuclear power history, the Chernobyl (AKA Chornobyl or V.I. Lenin Memorial) Nuclear Power Plant was one of the UsefulNotes/SovietUnion's biggest and most modern nuclear plants, designed to give power to the city of Kyiv / Kiev[[note]]"Kiev" is the transliteration from Russian to English, while [[PleaseSelectNewCityName "Kyiv" is the transliteration from Ukrainian to English.]] Nowadays, most Ukrainians ''[[BerserkButton don't like]]'' "Kiev" being used.[[/note]], Ukrainian SSR (now {{UsefulNotes/Ukraine}}). The disaster was the first accident to score a 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, its highest rating (the only other with this rating is the Fukushima Daiichi disaster of 2011), and surrounding areas remain uninhabitable to this day.

The site of what is often regarded as the worst disaster in nuclear power history, the Chernobyl (AKA Chornobyl or V.I. Lenin Memorial) Nuclear Power Plant was one of the UsefulNotes/SovietUnion's biggest and most modern nuclear plants, designed to give power to the city of Kiev / Kyiv[[note]]"Kiev" is the transliteration from Russian to English, while [[PleaseSelectNewCityName "Kyiv" is the transliteration from Ukrainian to English.]] Nowadays, most Ukrainians ''[[BerserkButton don't like]]'' "Kiev" being used.[[/note]], Ukrainian SSR (now {{UsefulNotes/Ukraine}}). The disaster was the first accident to score a 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, its highest rating (the only other with this rating is the Fukushima Daiichi disaster of 2011), and surrounding areas remain uninhabitable to this day.

The disaster, which happened on April 26, 1986 at 01:23 am Moscow time, was the result of [[DisasterDominoes several factors]]. The RBMK reactor designs used in Soviet plants were inherently flawed in two ways; firstly, if the connection to the main electrical grid was lost, the reactor's cooling systems would lose power, and the diesel-powered backup generators would take over a minute to provide sufficient power to cool the reactor, which could lead to a meltdown in the interim. Secondly, the reactor could heat up very quickly and had an (unknown to its operators and most nuclear scientists, thanks to the state suppressing the information after it was discovered in 1983) tendency to surge power levels when a SCRAM (AZ-5) button was pressed to stop the reaction. Reactor #4 (the newest of Chernobyl's reactors and the one in which the accident occurred), like all [=RBMKs=] had a strong containment structure on the side, but not on its roof.[[note]](They weren't included in the design, as it would have been prohibitively expensive for a reactor as bulky as the RBMK. Not that a full containment structure would have survived the explosion -- the less violent Fukushima Daiichi disaster in 2011 was still enough to completely destroy the containment structures at that plant -- but it would have at least absorbed enough of the explosion to limit the fallout to a much smaller area)[[/note]] The plant personnel were also carrying out a dangerous test with Reactor #4 for power outage protocols at night (since they didn't want to interfere with citizens' electricity usage) with inexperienced workers. [[note]]The test was originally scheduled for earlier in the day, but Kiev's power grid controller asked for a delay due to end of month power requirements requiring the plant remain at 1600MW power for longer than it was supposed to, which led to a build up of xenon in the reactor that did not go away when the test got underway 11 hours later. By then, a shift change had occurred, and the experienced reactor operators were relieved by less experienced personnel not familiar with the test protocols.[[/note]]

The site of what is often regarded as the worst disaster in nuclear power history, the Chernobyl (AKA Chornobyl or V.I. Lenin Memorial) Nuclear Power Plant was one of the UsefulNotes/SovietUnion's biggest and most modern nuclear plants, designed to give power to the city of Kiev / Kyiv[[note]]"Kiev" is the transliteration from Russian to English, while "Kyiv" is the transliteration from Ukrainian to English. Nowadays, most Ukrainians ''don't like'' "Kiev" being used.[[/note]], Ukrainian SSR (now {{UsefulNotes/Ukraine}}). The disaster was the first accident to score a 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, its highest rating (the only other with this rating is the Fukushima Daiichi disaster of 2011), and surrounding areas remain uninhabitable to this day.

* NuclearNasty: As a place of radioactive contamination, many stories portray the area as a source of these. While radioactivity has [[https://www.livescience.com/65563-chernobyl-radiation-effects-body.html nasty effects on living bodies]], monstrously mutated organisms are mostly Main/{{averted}} in real life. Local animals are mostly not heavily affected by the radiation heavily (due to their normal lifespan being too short to see effects), and some even adapt to the radioactive environment.

* ''Film/ChernobylDiaries'' is a horror film following a group of American tourists who visit the Exclusion Zone. The trip goes downhill very quickly and ends with [[spoiler:an accidental visit to the inside of the reactor itself and massacre by [[NuclearNasty mutated humanoid zombies]].]]

* In ''Webcomic/{{Polandball}}'', Belarus is often depicted as having [[NuclearNasty three eyes]] in reference to the Chernobyl disaster. (Chernobyl is located near the Ukraine/Belarus border, and Belarus suffered the majority of the contamination from the accident.)