It is known as a horrible accident in the entire history of mankind. This accident took place in 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was situated near the city of Pripyat in the north of the .Ukrainian SSR The station was composed of four reactors each reactor produced about 1000 megawatts of electrical power.

On April 26, 1998, this catastrophe occurred. This disaster occurred when technicians at reactor number 4 attempted a poorly designed experiment. In a reactor, there were a power-regulating system and emergency safety systems but workers, unfortunately, shut down them. They also draw out most of the control rods from their core while letting the reactor to work on 7 percent power. These mistakes were also added by others, and the chain reaction in the core went out of control at 1:23 AM on April 26. This results in several explosions which set off a big fireball and it blew off the heavy steel and concrete lid of the reactor. Large amounts of radioactive material are released into the atmosphere by the burning fire in the graphite core.

In Pripyat city, about 30,000 people began to be evacuated on April 27. On April 28, Swedish detect some abnormally high level of radioactivity radiations which were transported through winds. It urged the media for this explanation. The Soviet officials confessed there had been a catastrophe at Chernobyl, thus setting off an international outcry over the hazard produced by the radioactive radiations. Wastage of radioactive material was buried at some 800 temporary sites, and later in the year, the highly radioactive reactor core was encircled in a concrete-and-steel. About 50 people died in initial explosions and more than dozens of people were getting serious sickness by radiation and sources claim they later died. About 50 to 185 million curies radionuclides were spread into the atmosphere which was several times more radioactivity developed by "Fat-man and Little-boy" atomic bombs which were dropped by the USA on Japan in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Emission of radioactivity by the Chernobyl disaster was spread through wind over Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine and later on reached as far west France and Italy. Forest and farmland became contaminated in millions of acres.

 Many thousands of people were relocated. There were people in hundreds of thousands, who was remained in contaminated land. After some years livestock was born deformed. It (radioactivity) also developed sickness and cancer in human beings. The Chernobyl disaster gave birth to criticism of unsafe procedures and design flaws in Soviet nuclear reactors. The International community also enhanced resistance to the construction of such nuclear plants. After some years Chernobyl was officially decommissioned. After this accident, the Soviet Union made a circle-shaped exclusion zone with a radius of about 18.6 miles centered on the nuclear power plant. This zone covered the area of about 1017 square miles around the plant. Later on, it was extended to 1600 square miles to include heavily radiated areas outside the initial zone. However, no people are living in the exclusion zone just scientists get allow permits for study purposes for a limited time.

Credits : Zain ul Abideen !