The Chernobyl nuclear power plant (As officially named, V.I.Lenin Memorial Nuclear Power Station) is located near the town of Pripyat, Ukraine, 18 km (11.2 miles) north-west of the city of Chernobyl. It is situated 16 km (9.9 miles) from the border of Ukraine and Belarus, and about 110 km (68.4 miles) north of Kiev.
Construction
The station consists of four RBMK-1000 type reactors, each capable of producing 1000 megawatt of electric power and 3.2 gigawatt of thermal power. The four reactors together produced about 10% of Ukraine's energy demands at the time of the accident. Construction of the plant and the city of Pripyat began in 1970, but it wasn't until 1977 that the #1 reactor was commissioned. The reactor #2 was commissioned in 1978, followed by #3 in 1981 and #4 in 1983. Additional reactors 5 and 6, capable of producing 1000 MW each were under construction at the time of the accident.
The Disaster
On April 26, 1986, a sequence of events unfolded that lead to what has been described as the worst accident in the history of nuclear power. During a routine test to determine reactor's capabilities of working under heavier load, important safety measures were overlooked, and the resulting uncontrollable reaction caused steam pressure to build up, effectively blowing off a better part of the reactor assembly building and releasing enormous amounts of radioactivity in the atmosphere. It wasn't until radiation detectors in Sweden went off, that the Soviet government admitted that the accident happened, and told the rest of the world the proportions of it. The city of Pripyat, however, was not evacuated until the next day.
The Aftermath
Following the accident, the remaining three reactors were shut down, because the entire plant was highly contaminated with radiation and it was unsafe for the employees to work in such conditions. Nevertheless, a massive cleanup was done inside the buildings, partly due to the high energy demand, and reactors 1 and 2 were restarted by the fall of 1986, and after a more thorough cleanup process, reactor 3 (which is contained in the same building as the destroyed unit 4) was restarted in the fall of 1987.
Decommissioning
Unit 3 was the last reactor to be operated at the Chernobyl plant. It was functioning normally but was shut down in December of 2000. The reason was that the politicians wanted the Chernobyl plant closed by the year 2000 for no obvious reasons except that it was the same plant where the infamous accident happened in 1986.
Since shutdown, a coal power plant was constructed next to the Chernobyl site in order to provide electricity for the plant. People will continue to work at the Chernobyl plant until the reactor units 1, 2, and 3 will be totally decommissioned, which is expected to take years. The remains of the reactor unit 4 will remain radioactive for centuries to come. A half-life of Plutonium 239, which is one of the radioactive elements within the destroyed reactor's ruins is over 24,000 years.
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| Aftermath of the explosion | Construction of sarcophagus | Completed sarcophagus | Render of a new containment vessel proposal |