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Witnesses, survivors and front-line heroes recall the first days of the Chernobyl disaster of April 1986. With rare archive footage of the world's worst ever nuclear accident.
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00:00:01TRIP TRIP TRIP TRIP TRIP
00:00:30Just remember, we were together with him.
00:00:38This is my beautiful office.
00:00:43Here he is! My clothes!
00:00:45I came to work in 1986, 26 April.
00:01:14The Chernobyl nuclear power plant is rocked by an explosion.
00:01:20The nuclear reactor itself is physically destroyed.
00:01:25There is complete shock in the control room.
00:01:30We were convinced that our reactor cannot be destroyed.
00:01:34Radiation shoots upwards, creating a purple column of light.
00:01:41The greatest ever nuclear accident.
00:01:44It will have far-reaching consequences that will change the course of history.
00:01:50But for 48 hours, the world knows nothing.
00:01:55The Soviet government covers it up.
00:01:58And the locals are locked in a contaminated city.
00:02:02This is a police state.
00:02:05The KGB swings into action.
00:02:08The phone lines are cut and roadblocks erected.
00:02:12No one's allowed in or out.
00:02:15By the time the radioactive winds reach Sweden, the people in Pripyat still don't know anything about the danger they're
00:02:22in.
00:02:33This is the untold story of the people living in the shadow of Chernobyl.
00:02:39The first responders battling the blaze.
00:02:54And the forgotten heroes who risked everything to prevent an even bigger global catastrophe.
00:03:00It will fall right now.
00:03:02It will fall right now.
00:03:03It will fall right now.
00:03:04It will fall right now.
00:03:05It will fall right now.
00:03:05Some people say they were not there.
00:03:07They all died.
00:03:08But you're alive.
00:03:10Over 48 hours leading up to the evacuation of Pripyat, an unprecedented disaster unfolds.
00:03:18Exposing one of the deadliest cover-ups in history.
00:03:22They don't know that nothing will be the same ever again.
00:03:27Their world has changed forever.
00:03:56The survivors of the Chernobyl disaster have returned to their former hometown of Pripyat.
00:04:05Some of them for the first time in 40 years.
00:04:13What is happening with our police clinic?
00:04:16Our registration, our clothes.
00:04:23Atomgrad comes from the Russian word for atomic city.
00:04:29It is literally that, a city built next or near a nuclear power station.
00:04:38I live in my own home, where my childhood was.
00:04:44This is a bed, on which I slept.
00:04:53Pripyat is a town built to house the employees and the construction workers who work at the plant.
00:05:06I have to leave.
00:05:07This is the path of the implementation of the forces.
00:05:12But you do not support the reactor in the safe level.
00:05:21под тобой находится ни много ни мало 220 тонн урана которыми ты управляешь
00:05:28непосредственно это ощущение гордости ощущение своей силы но очень-очень присущ на было нам
00:05:38такой город пропал загубили город
00:05:49правил поколения может вернуться сюда
00:05:56it's a city that ends its life and death to the Chernobyl nuclear power station
00:06:08this ghost town lies at the heart of a vast radioactive exclusion zone that covers more
00:06:14than two-and-a-half thousand square kilometers
00:06:25it was once a thriving community of fifty thousand people
00:06:31but they left under a cloud of deception
00:06:42they've returned to tell their own stories and relive the city's final days in the wake of the worst nuclear
00:06:49disaster in history
00:06:55a 48-hour period that truly changed the world
00:07:02and
00:07:07and
00:07:08and
00:07:09and
00:07:09and
00:07:23It was the Friday.
00:07:25After work, all were happy, the villages went home, because it was two days of the weekend.
00:07:38by late afternoon people are clocking off for work getting ready for the weekend and it's
00:07:44a big one it's the weekend before the mayday holiday which is a huge deal in the soviet union
00:08:13it's a kind of exemplary socialist city very modern
00:08:21it's very nicely laid out with lots of open spaces green spaces parks playgrounds
00:08:30it's surrounded by very nice rooms of countryside there are lovely woods
00:08:38there is the river pripets
00:08:44it's fun to live
00:08:45it's fun to live
00:08:50it's a young city
00:09:13so the nice surroundings
00:09:17also match nice facilities in the city there are two stadiums there are two swimming pools
00:09:25so its population can enjoy these gifts of the state
00:09:32they're rewarded for the important work that they do for the nuclear industry
00:09:44chernobyl's construction is part of a soviet drive to harness nuclear energy
00:09:51to both meet surging electricity demand and catch up with the west
00:10:02science is the front line of the cold war ideological battle between the soviet union and the united states
00:10:13and nuclear science is the absolute darling of the soviet government and soviet leadership
00:10:28field
00:10:33I was hired as a specialist, and I came here to the building station, to the first block that was
00:10:44built.
00:10:47Section by section it was going to be brought online, reactor by reactor, to start powering Kyiv and the entire
00:10:56region.
00:11:00Each reactor can generate a thousand megawatts of electricity, which is enough to power more than a million modern homes.
00:11:11By 1986, reactor four is online, and work is already underway on reactors five and six.
00:11:21If the plans are realised, this will become the biggest nuclear complex in the world.
00:11:32People thought of atomic science as related to atomic weapons.
00:11:41And once the Soviet Union had its atomic weapons, there was a need for a rebranding.
00:11:49So, the Soviet Union starts to use the term, the peaceful atom.
00:12:06You can see the dichotomy in nuclear technology when you look at one of the tallest buildings in Pripyat, which
00:12:14talks about may the atom be a worker and not a soldier.
00:12:18It reflects the enthusiasm for the peaceful applications of atomic energy.
00:12:26One of the great cities of the Soviet Empire would soon be fuelled entirely by peaceful nuclear power.
00:12:50It was a afternoon, it was a evening, 25 January 1986.
00:12:54We came to work with our colleagues and friends and we went to fishing.
00:13:02We went to the canal near the station.
00:13:08Senior operator of Reactor 4, Alexander Zelentsov, is at home preparing for work.
00:13:15But at 9 p.m. he receives a phone call from his colleague, Valery Hodomchuk, asking to take the night
00:13:20shift.
00:13:22So Alexander will now clock on in the morning.
00:13:45Peter, who also had a late shift change, is enjoying his unexpected night off.
00:14:11He invites friends back to his apartment, opposite the fire station, where they continue drinking vodka and Soviet champagne.
00:14:23As Alexander's opposite number, Valery Hodomchuk, prepares for the midnight shift, a call comes into the plans.
00:14:32A delayed safety test is finally given the go-ahead.
00:14:36It's now nine hours overdue.
00:14:40The question that this test was supposed to check, or to give answers to, was what if there is an
00:14:47electricity cut?
00:14:48A power failure?
00:14:54With regard to this specific safety test, to see if the turbine could freewheel and provide enough power to the
00:15:02reactor,
00:15:03that it would keep the cooling water circulating for long enough for the emergency generators to start.
00:15:11That's a perfectly reasonable test to do.
00:15:16They had, however, made three previous attempts to do this test, which had been either unsuccessful or inconclusive.
00:15:25So this was their fourth bite at the cherry.
00:15:28In charge is a senior manager, desperate to finally get the test signed off.
00:15:37Anatoly Stepanovich Dyatlov sees the promise of promotion ahead.
00:15:44All he's got to do is run this experiment.
00:15:52The reactor has now been running at reduced power for most of the day, and a shift change is imminent.
00:16:01Dyatlov decides he will press ahead once the night shift arrives.
00:16:07The day shift, the A-team, they clock off at the end of the workday on Friday.
00:16:15The next team that comes on at midnight has not been prepared at all for what's in store for them.
00:16:22They have not been briefed.
00:16:32Piloting the reactor is a 25-year-old engineer.
00:16:36He's been in the job for just two months.
00:16:39Pilots go 1 to 20 minutes on Windows.
00:16:41Pilots go CAA and stick in until they need more families,
00:16:49Pilots go up in order for us or for them.
00:16:51Pilots go up until 2 in 3 seconds.
00:16:52Pilots go up until 100m.
00:16:53Pilots go up until the rest of the week vai's go up until we data Maria call us on our
00:16:53side of if something else will allow us to crash a new place.
00:16:54the merrymat
00:16:55It vaguely allows the computer to bring reactor power down to near zero.
00:17:03At 12.30, the power output from number four reactor is dropping.
00:17:11There are alarms going off.
00:17:14There are lights flashing.
00:17:22If you run a reactor like that at low power, then some of the products of the nuclear reaction will
00:17:32build up in it.
00:17:33In particular, a thing called xenon, which will, in the jargon, poison the reactor.
00:17:41Dyatlov insists they pull out the graphite control rods to help speed up the reaction.
00:17:46And increase power.
00:17:52Two of the operators initially refuse, concerned that the reactor is dangerously unstable.
00:17:59But when Dyatlov threatens them, they back down.
00:18:05Control rods essentially are the throttle that try and keep the power steady.
00:18:10So you need more power, you pull the control rods out.
00:18:14And they reach the point where a lot of the control rods are fully out of the reactor.
00:18:20And they're still not seeing the power going up.
00:18:27Eventually, by 1am, they manage to raise the power to 200 megawatts.
00:18:36It's nowhere near the minimum 720 megawatts stipulated for the test.
00:18:41But Dyatlov is adamant it's good enough.
00:18:46They cut the power and let the turbines freewheel for 36 seconds.
00:19:00When they think they've concluded the test, they press this AZ-5 button, which shuts the reactor down.
00:19:10But the readings begin to confuse the scientists.
00:19:15The reactor starts heating up.
00:19:17And the reaction starts speeding up.
00:19:21The men hear a deep thud and are nearly thrown off their feet as an explosion rocks the building.
00:19:33Outside the complex, Sergey is still fishing in the power plant's cooling pond.
00:19:40He's one of the very few to witness the immediate aftermath.
00:20:07A strange purple beam of light illuminates the night sky.
00:20:22The scientists in the control room are baffled.
00:20:25They've hit the emergency shutdown button.
00:20:28In their minds, the ultimate fail-safe.
00:20:33They believe that our reactor can't burn our reactor.
00:20:38It's an accident.
00:20:40It may be a gas leak or a gas leak.
00:20:43But it's no reactor.
00:20:45Sergey and his colleagues cycle over to take a closer look.
00:20:58What they see sends shipings down their spines.
00:21:16The End
00:21:17At 1.23am on Saturday 26 April 1986, engineers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine feel the shudder
00:21:27of two explosions.
00:21:35The End
00:21:36There is complete shock in the control room.
00:21:38They don't understand what has just happened.
00:21:42Is it an earthquake or an enemy attack?
00:21:44A nuclear war may have started.
00:21:48They're constantly working on the premise that a reactor cannot explode.
00:21:57Soviet propaganda, supported by the USSR's top atomic scientists, has long reinforced the idea that these reactors are the most
00:22:05reliable in the world.
00:22:09But the unthinkable has happened.
00:22:14The nuclear reactor itself is physically destroyed, so it's broken up.
00:22:19The lid has been blown off.
00:22:24The temperature in the core approaches a level similar to the surface of the sun, before blowing the thousand-ton
00:22:30lid and the roof clean off.
00:22:34You've got some extremely radioactive material which is completely uncontained and on fire.
00:22:44The fire station in Pripyat is immediately alerted.
00:22:51This is the dispatcher, who received the call for fire.
00:22:59At 1.28 am, the phones start ringing off the hook.
00:23:06Can you hear me?
00:23:08Yes.
00:23:09This is Alexeyn.
00:23:10Yes.
00:23:11This is the third and fourth block.
00:23:14This is the result of an earthquake.
00:23:15Can you hear me?
00:23:16Can you hear me?
00:23:19Men of the third watch look over to see a mushroom-shaped cloud filling the moonlit sky.
00:23:30With Peter off duty, his friend Volodymyr Pravik is in charge.
00:23:39They scramble into the fire trucks and head out.
00:23:42It's only two minutes by road.
00:23:47Lieutenant Pravik immediately radios signal number three, which is the highest alert,
00:23:54which will bring all the fire brigades in the entire Kiev region to the power plant.
00:24:01But he doesn't wait for them to arrive.
00:24:05He and his crew go into this burning inferno without waiting.
00:24:13And they find soon that they're battling against something that is quite different.
00:24:19Their bodies begin to tell them that this is no ordinary fire.
00:24:24Men begin vomiting, a symptom of radiation sickness.
00:24:29One of the team goes blind.
00:24:31Their hands and feet begin to scald and burn from touching chunks of graphite spat out of the core.
00:24:42Back in Pripyat, Peter turns in after a night of drinking with friends.
00:25:04Peter arrives around 2.30 a.m.
00:25:07He's ordered straight up onto the roof of the complex.
00:25:12And he goes onto the roof of the turbine hull to stop the spread of the fire to another reactor
00:25:17in unit number three.
00:25:22Because if WiFi was on the third block on the roof of the generates,
00:25:24You can see an accident by external
00:25:29So, they makex of fire arrive.
00:25:49Peter's colleagues on the roof start feeling seriously ill.
00:26:01Not yet suffering symptoms himself, he stays behind and is soon one of the last on the roof.
00:26:14Senior operator of reactor 4, Alexander Zelentsov, is suddenly awoken by his phone.
00:26:19He's called to the plant immediately.
00:26:42His first job is to help fully disconnect reactor 4 from reactor 3.
00:26:50They share some of the same systems and infrastructure, so it needs to be isolated.
00:26:59Then he goes in search of Valery Hodimchuk, his colleague who had earlier taken his night shift.
00:27:06But the inside of Unit 4 is a tangled web of destruction.
00:27:28Unlike the firefighters, Alexander is fully aware that he's potentially receiving a fatal dose of radiation.
00:27:55There's no sign of Valery Hodimchuk. His body is never found.
00:28:03At 4am, senior management gathers in the underground bunker, designed to withstand nuclear attack.
00:28:12Anatoly Dyatlov, the man in charge of the ill-fated safety test, joins them weak and retching, yet still downplaying
00:28:20the incident.
00:28:22Dyatlov tells the senior management that it's all contained.
00:28:30It's just a hydrogen explosion. There is no breach in reactor number 4.
00:28:39The bosses are more than happy to pass this on to their superiors.
00:28:46The Soviet Union has got layers and layers of bureaucracy, but there's no real accountability.
00:28:58Truth isn't important in the Soviet Union.
00:29:05And the entire Soviet system is designed so that Dyatlov's lie is replicated right up the chain of command,
00:29:18all the way to the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.
00:29:32By the time Gorbachev receives the message, Peter is one of nearly 200 men bringing the fires under control.
00:29:43But the reactor core continues to burn.
00:29:50Eventually, Peter is called down from the roof and heads to the decontamination showers.
00:29:57Where he sees his father, also a firefighter.
00:30:02He's waiting for his boy to come out.
00:30:05But it is in the shower that Petrov feels really sick.
00:30:09And when he comes out, he can barely hear or see.
00:30:12He only hears his father say to him,
00:30:14Hold on.
00:30:17And that he's taken to the hospital.
00:30:42The hospital has invoked its crisis plan.
00:30:47They've moved out all the routine patients.
00:30:49They've opened up as many beds as they can.
00:30:52And they're waiting.
00:30:53They're waiting for the wave that is about to hit them.
00:31:00They began to lay them down,
00:31:01assemble their chairs,
00:31:03and shoot them off as they were to take the hospital.
00:31:10And they brought them up.
00:31:11They were red, burned, but the burning of light is not the same as the heat.
00:31:18The face is just pink, even pink.
00:31:29Radiation destroys cells, it disrupts connective tissues.
00:31:36And eventually, if doses are really, really acute, in fact, it damages the central nervous system and essentially renders you
00:31:45unconscious very rapidly.
00:31:50But at first, it looks like a bad case of sunburn.
00:31:56With no radiology departments and minimal training, the hospital staff are initially confounded.
00:32:06Here in an Atomgrad, an atom city, you'd think they would be prepared to deal with radiation accidents.
00:32:14But of course, nobody would admit that anything could go wrong in a Soviet nuclear power station.
00:32:22So nobody was prepared for the radiation effects on the human body that came when something did go wrong.
00:32:35They're treating patients with milk before they realize these are no ordinary burns and that their clothes are contaminated.
00:32:46And that's when the nurses realized that this isn't cast poisoning and they have to treat their patients differently.
00:32:53They make them strip, they take their clothes away and lock it in a basement.
00:33:14And they begin to administer IV troops. And this is really the first thing that begins to help and alleviate
00:33:22their symptoms.
00:33:25In the meantime, they say, they have to spray the water with glucose, with a sugar, with a ranger, with
00:33:31an azotonic acid.
00:33:33Everything is all there.
00:33:33Because they had to be carrying out of water, to remove them.
00:33:40To remove them, remove them, remove them.
00:33:43They didn't have to have to deal with them.
00:33:45There was a lot of noise.
00:33:48It was hard.
00:33:52More and more patients are flooding in,
00:33:55straining the hospital's limited resources.
00:34:00In every room, there was not enough scissors.
00:34:05They tied the scissors,
00:34:07and on the scissors they tied the scissors
00:34:11and made the guys a scissors.
00:34:18I got married by Volo.
00:34:21He was a son of my girlfriend.
00:34:26He was on my knees.
00:34:29He has his six patients.
00:34:32He was in the room, in the room,
00:34:34and he was so difficult.
00:34:38How did I not get out of him?
00:34:40I said, for a minute, for a minute, for a second.
00:34:42You know what?
00:34:45We knew a lot of people.
00:34:47He was smiling.
00:34:52By daybreak, the hospital records its first fatality.
00:34:59The reactor is still freely spewing radiation into the atmosphere.
00:35:07As daylight lays bare the true extent of the damage.
00:35:25The people of Pripyat are only just waking up.
00:35:29to a city that has been completely sealed off from the outside world.
00:35:46The truth about the enormity of the disaster that has just happened
00:35:50will slowly start to dawn on the Soviet scientists.
00:35:58But instead of alerting the world to the danger,
00:36:02the Soviet officials will remain silent.
00:36:06The authorities' first instinct is to try and cover it up.
00:36:13The KGB swings into action.
00:36:17They cut off all the phone lines to Pripyat and Chernobyl.
00:36:23They close the roads.
00:36:25They don't let anybody leave.
00:36:28They're worried about spreading panic.
00:36:30They want to control the flow of information.
00:36:41Just a few kilometers from the reactor,
00:36:44the town's 50,000 residents are kept in the dark,
00:36:48completely oblivious to the radiation filling the air around them.
00:36:51And a burden of pressure complex music is associated with NOVSRI
00:36:58By 7 p.m.
00:36:59После구�Bry зем shares like Africa
00:36:5922 a p.m.
00:37:042 p.m.
00:37:04My parents went to work, I went to school.
00:37:17It's a lovely weekend, they go on picnics,
00:37:20there are children playing in the playground.
00:37:25There are even weddings going on in the city.
00:37:30And no one tells them anything.
00:37:37Radiation on the streets of Pripyat is recorded at 25,000 times the normal levels.
00:37:45By nightfall, it will be 90,000.
00:37:51It's so high, radiation particles strike the camera sensors,
00:37:55causing bursts of light and flashes on the film footage.
00:38:12In the school we were not long, we left us quickly from home.
00:38:15Well, since the parents were at work,
00:38:21things were children,
00:38:22we gathered together with friends,
00:38:24we went to the city to see.
00:38:28We went to the bridge,
00:38:29we looked at the bridge,
00:38:30and we looked at the station.
00:38:36We went to the city.
00:38:38We went to the city.
00:38:39We went to the street.
00:38:41We went to the city.
00:38:41But children walked in the halls.
00:38:45The police was already in the保護 masks.
00:38:53Those measures are being observed by people.
00:38:56And that tells people,
00:38:57that something very dangerous is going on.
00:39:22While the authorities keep Pripyat in lockdown,
00:39:25they're preparing to save Moscow from Chernobyl's radioactive fallout.
00:39:52At 4pm on the 26th of April 1986,
00:39:56officials gather at the headquarters of the Pripyat Communist Party.
00:40:01Senior management of the plant finally admits that Reactor 4 has in fact exploded,
00:40:07and that pumping cooling water through the core is pointless.
00:40:14Their efforts over the last 12 hours,
00:40:16which have included several suicide missions,
00:40:19were totally in vain.
00:40:26Government officials are still pondering whether to evacuate the city,
00:40:30when the head of the military radiation reconnaissance team bursts in.
00:40:35He's taken readings outside the power plant,
00:40:38a hundred million times normal levels.
00:40:42Enough to kill someone in close proximity within 15 minutes.
00:40:54Engineers have also picked up another problem.
00:40:57A significant amount of nuclear fuel is still burning within the damaged reactor vessel.
00:41:05Once there is a realisation that the reactor can and has exploded,
00:41:11there are new dangers that are coming to minds of the scientists working on the cleanup.
00:41:17And one danger that becomes very real is that it will continue to heat up in its core,
00:41:24and that it will explode.
00:41:28And it could be a kind of explosion that will set off the neighbouring reactor,
00:41:34in the unit number three, and then possibly the other two.
00:41:39This could leave large swathes of Europe uninhabitable for thousands of years.
00:41:47The second problem that they are worried about is kind of in the opposite direction,
00:41:53that the reactor will melt, literally.
00:41:57And the radioactive fuel and all the debris will get into the water supply.
00:42:02From there they will poison the Black Sea,
00:42:05the Mediterranean and finally the oceans.
00:42:08That again would be potentially a global catastrophe.
00:42:15The government commission into the accident finally concedes that evacuation of the town is necessary.
00:42:26But it's still 19 hours until the population is relocated.
00:42:40At the hospital, authorities prepare to spirit the worst affected patients away to Moscow.
00:42:50Peter is told to get ready.
00:42:55And you go to the bottom.
00:42:57You will be waiting for an autobus.
00:42:59But no one without any sense.
00:43:04But of course the relatives are there.
00:43:06They are besieging the hospital.
00:43:07They want to see their husbands, their sons.
00:43:10And this is where the authorities try a trick.
00:43:14They are told by the people in charge,
00:43:17go home and start packing a bag to get them out of the way.
00:43:24But the time they come back to the hospital, their loved ones are gone.
00:43:43In total, 26 firefighters and plant workers are transported to the capital.
00:43:52When the police were brought to Moscow,
00:43:56they were all sold.
00:43:59They were in charge of the hospital.
00:44:03When they brought us to the hospital,
00:44:04As people were turned in their hands with their homes,
00:44:06they decided a week we'll go to the hospital,
00:44:11we were to come back to the hospital.
00:44:38But when Peter is assessed, one of the doctors is amazed
00:44:42at his condition, and puts it down to the amount of vodka in his system.
00:44:53Peter and Pravik are in good spirits, even joking with staff.
00:45:00There's an apparent recovery, where people seem to get better, but actually what's happened
00:45:06is that there's been long-term damage to key systems in the body, and actually your ability
00:45:14just to do the normal, replacing cells, has gone.
00:45:18So people will then deteriorate again after this so-called latent period.
00:45:25At that point you will either recover or you will die.
00:45:41It's the last time Peter will see Pravik alive.
00:45:55A hundred kilometres north of Chernobyl, residents in the countryside of Belarus witness a strange
00:46:02weather phenomenon.
00:46:06They're looking up at the sky, they're seeing this strange colouration.
00:46:16It's very dirty, it's black, this is the famous black brains.
00:46:21People say they saw reddish purple colours.
00:46:28And they're also seeing aeroplanes flying in the sky, they're seeing colours coming out
00:46:33from the rear of the aeroplanes.
00:46:37Some have also even reported rockets being fired into the skies.
00:46:43What they are seeing is the Kremlin's desperate response to a growing threat against the capital
00:46:48city.
00:46:54Up in the atmosphere, there is lethal, very concentrated radioactivity.
00:47:03Overnight of the 26th of April to the 27th, we are getting wind coming from the west to the
00:47:13east heading in the direction of Moscow.
00:47:20The authorities decide to make it rain.
00:47:23They decide that it would rain over Belarus.
00:47:28The Soviet Union had the capability to fly through the clouds, spread the chemicals that would cause
00:47:37the droplets to form, that would cause the rain to fall out before it reached Moscow.
00:47:46They'll pull the radioactivity with it down onto the ground.
00:47:50That is the process of cloud seeding.
00:47:57An army of pilots is ordered into the skies over rural Belarus.
00:48:05That rain affects hundreds of thousands of people.
00:48:10It makes Belarus the worst affected territory.
00:48:1570% of the Chernobyl nuclear fallout, radioactive fallout, falls on the territory of Belarus.
00:48:28Soon people start flooding local hospitals, displaying the syndromes of the radiation sickness.
00:48:36So this is the poisoning of the entire Republic that will have enormous long-term consequences on people's lives,
00:48:44for generations to come.
00:48:50But the radioactive cloud would soon become too big for even the Soviets to control.
00:49:08At midday, on Sunday the 27th of April 1986, life continues as normal in Pripyat.
00:49:20By the time the radioactive clouds reach as far as Sweden, people in Pripyat, who are living right next to
00:49:26the plant,
00:49:27still know nothing about what has happened or the danger in which they're in.
00:49:36We have reports of one person going up to the roof of his apartment block and hoping to get a
00:49:43bit of suntan.
00:49:44And he's taken aback by how quickly the suntan catches.
00:49:50Above them is the sound of helicopters, preparing an assault on Chernobyl's reactor number four.
00:50:20So military pilots are charged with the task of flying over the open reactor
00:50:25and dropping the bags with sand, clay and boron into the opening.
00:50:32Boron is a very good way of suppressing a nuclear reaction.
00:50:40Dolomite, clay are good for smothering graphite fires.
00:50:46And also they put lead in because they were trying to reduce the radiation dose coming out of the wrecked
00:50:55reactor
00:50:55to people who were trying to work in the vicinity.
00:51:03The liquidation campaign is now underway.
00:51:06The beginning of a mammoth mobilisation of Soviet resources that will ramp up in the coming days.
00:51:20In Pripyat, fears over causing panic are finally put aside for the health of the town's population.
00:51:311200 buses and 240 trucks are commandeered from Kyiv and the region.
00:51:40The announcement about the evacuation comes at 1pm in the middle of a lovely Sunday afternoon.
00:51:51This is the last thing people are expecting, really.
00:51:57It's true there has been an explosion, but for 36 hours people have been told nothing about their radioactivity.
00:52:06And so this order to evacuate comes like a bolt from the blue.
00:52:12The people are outside, there are children eating ice cream in the cafeteria,
00:52:16and suddenly they are told to leave their homes.
00:52:20The people are out there.
00:52:22I want to know that the population is coming out from Teriyan.
00:52:23In other words, too.
00:52:23In terms of the emergency of the modern electric force in my city,
00:52:27at the same time, there is a place that is in order to build a radio station.
00:52:32For the station to be used, it is a travel ravine.
00:52:34In the first place, there is a travel station to develop a different location.
00:52:34The people are out there.
00:52:35In order of a stop.
00:52:35That's the key to avoid a panic.
00:52:36And in the first place, there is a real car.
00:52:39In terms of the public activity, that is.
00:52:40The people used to be in the enemy.
00:52:41The people especially when we are speaking,
00:52:42There is a time to be able,
00:52:44evakuation of residents of the city, M-Punkts, of the Kiev region.
00:52:53All of the families went to the street, they took them, they gathered them.
00:52:57The list is already agreed to take the necessary steps,
00:53:04documents, and eat for 2-3 days.
00:53:11They've been told that the evakuation will only be for 3 days.
00:53:16People are told to take only the most essential items with them.
00:53:25Mать куда-то ушла, пришла вся в слезах,
00:53:29так как она была по медицинской части,
00:53:34и была военная обязанность,
00:53:37сказали, что она с нами не едет.
00:53:40Это был, конечно,
00:53:42по крайней мере для меня очень большой шок,
00:53:44что мы куда-то уезжаем и уезжаем без матери.
00:53:50Вероятно, Володимир's mother is given a reprieve.
00:53:54Очень долго плакали, потом она шла,
00:53:56но все-таки она вернулась.
00:53:58Ее отпустили, скорее всего,
00:54:01из-за того, что двое несовершеннолетних детей.
00:54:09The mood is very calm, very orderly.
00:54:11People get into the buses,
00:54:14and the buses take off.
00:54:15The operation proceeds pretty much as expected.
00:54:25Больше всего поразило.
00:54:27На одном из поворотов посмотрел в окно назад,
00:54:31посмотрел в окно вперед.
00:54:35Бесконечная очередь из автобусов,
00:54:38просто нескончаемая.
00:54:39Ни начало, ни конца.
00:54:42Запомнилась на всю жизнь.
00:54:50Я думал, что сейчас мы немножко где-то поездим,
00:54:56пересидим, и когда нам так обещали.
00:55:22ПОДПИШИСЬ!
00:55:27Субтитры создавал DimaTorzok
00:55:28Голстown.
00:55:41Radioactivity knows no borders.
00:55:44So, the story had crossed over the border
00:55:51from the Soviet Union,
00:55:52and was about to break internationally
00:55:56on Monday the 28th of April.
00:56:02On the Monday morning,
00:56:04a worker at the Forsmark power station in Sweden
00:56:07actually sets the alarms off on his way into work.
00:56:13His shoe has picked up fallout from Chernobyl.
00:56:21They quickly work out where it's coming from,
00:56:23and the Soviets are forced to admit
00:56:25there has been an accident.
00:56:29Despite requests from various countries
00:56:31for more information,
00:56:33they refuse to offer up any more detail.
00:56:37But it's soon making headlines across the globe.
00:56:42Brief and buried report
00:56:44of the biggest nuclear accident in history.
00:56:47It is one that was clearly addressed
00:56:48of the lethal effect being two to three miles.
00:56:52Exactly what caused the Chernobyl nuclear reactor
00:56:55to explode, we don't yet know.
00:56:57How many lives will have been lost
00:56:59as an immediate result of the disaster
00:57:00will be easier to calculate.
00:57:02But how many people are doomed eventually
00:57:04to fall victim to Chernobyl, we will never know.
00:57:10Some of these children will die young.
00:57:20On the 11th of May,
00:57:22the first control room operator dies,
00:57:24with his skin charred black and eyes wide open.
00:57:32Lieutenant Bravic succumbs to his injuries that same day.
00:57:39It's another week before Peter finds out.
00:57:42He's told that all of his colleagues have died.
00:57:45Their coffins are wrapped in plastic,
00:57:48welded shut inside zinc boxes,
00:57:51and covered with cement.
00:57:56And his job feels like they also felt too badly.
00:58:02But that's how I asked her for three times.
00:58:05Let's see.
00:58:07In妙есс aún sometimes
00:58:08maybe to mylie can start as possible...
00:58:28In the weeks and months that followed the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the cleanup
00:58:34effort gathers pace. The so-called liquidators, which comes from the Russian word for eliminating,
00:58:45eliminating the consequences of the disaster. So the number of these people is quite mind-boggling
00:58:51really. 600,000 people and more are drafted into these missions. Miners tunnel under the
00:59:01reactor's foundations to add a protective concrete slab and install a giant heat exchanger
00:59:06to cool down the molten core and prevent it melting into the groundwater.
00:59:21Men are tasked with removing radioactive graphite from the roof so a sarcophagus can be built
00:59:27over the wreckage. Nearly 4,000 so-called bio-robots, with homemade lead armor for protection, shovel
00:59:34graphite blocks over the side and into the core. They have 90 seconds, estimated to be
00:59:41a maximum lifetime dose.
00:59:44A lot of the soldiers sent to decontamination missions are young boys. They're draftees, so
00:59:51they're between 18 and 20 years of age. And they have to deal not just with the physical
00:59:56difficulties of decontamination, but also with the psychological burdens.
01:00:04They do it out of sense of duty, because there is some understanding at this point that this
01:00:12is needed to save people or to prevent an even greater disaster.
01:00:21On the 14th of May 1986, two and a half weeks after the explosion, Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledges
01:00:29the accidents in public for the first time.
01:00:58Mikhail Gorbachev has only been running the Soviet Union for its
01:01:0213 months at this point. He has been saying that the Soviet Union needs to have glasnost,
01:01:11openness, and taking all that time to even tell a scrap of the truth demonstrates that there
01:01:25is no openness in the Soviet Union.
01:01:34As pressure mounts at home and abroad, Gorbachev is forced to follow through on his promise of glasnost,
01:01:41as the Iron Curtain is gradually lifted.
01:01:48So, journalists begin to gain unprecedented access, for example, to nuclear scientists. This was an industry
01:01:56shrouded in secrecy. And once those floodgates are open, it's very difficult to kind of keep shutting them down.
01:02:07The real cause of the explosion is eventually revealed.
01:02:14There is a fatal flaw in every Soviet reactor that none of the scientists such a novel on the night
01:02:20of the explosion were aware of.
01:02:25The problem is that this scram system, this automated safety system that is meant to shut down the reactor very
01:02:33quickly in cases of emergency,
01:02:34the problem is that it is deeply flawed. The control rods, which are made of boron, the material that does
01:02:43slow down the reaction,
01:02:45those control rods have the tips that are made of graphite. So when the graphite tips are inserted into the
01:02:55hot reactor to slow down the reaction,
01:02:59they do the opposite. They speed it up.
01:03:02So as the control rods go back into the reactor, they greatly increase the reactivity. And that causes an explosion.
01:03:16Some top officials and atomic scientists had known about it for years, even decades.
01:03:25The nature of the Soviet Union, the secrecy, the self-deception, all of this is what causes the disaster in
01:03:37the first place.
01:03:41I got the chance to ask a question to Mikhail Gorbachev in person. And the question I chose was,
01:03:50what was your biggest problem at the time of Chernobyl? Mikhail Gorbachev told me that getting information was his biggest
01:04:01problem.
01:04:11The Chernobyl disaster also gives a boost to Ukrainian eco-nationalism because it becomes a political issue
01:04:19issue that the Ukrainian intelligence and cultural figures adopt as a national issue.
01:04:24It becomes a Ukrainian tragedy.
01:04:29But the refusal of Moscow again and again to recognize the damage done to the health and environment in Ukraine
01:04:38begins to contain a really strained relationship between Kyiv and Moscow.
01:04:56As Gorbachev says, the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
01:05:13It helped change the map of the world in a few years.
01:05:25The consequences of the disaster for the environment are enormous and the effects will last for centuries.
01:05:37This makes it easy sometimes to lose the human dimension of the tragedy.
01:05:45We're talking about impact on health, which is long term, the rise in cancer, and especially cancer in children, thyroid
01:05:54cancer, all kinds of disabilities.
01:06:01And I think it's really important to remember the people who suffered and who sacrificed their lives, their health,
01:06:07in trying to prevent an even bigger disaster, an even bigger catastrophe.
01:06:25Every year, Ukrainians come together to honor the fallen, those that died or suffered, at the hands of an unprecedented
01:06:34disaster.
01:06:48We've been living in many times a while, and every time it's all gone, and everything is gone, and everything
01:06:54is gone, and everything is gone.
01:06:55it all. But I want to say that we have been kept many years. They gave us 10 years.
01:07:27Well, a decade on from an audacious plan, Hatton Garden, The Great Diamond Heist, Wednesday
01:07:33night at 10 on Channel 4. And tomorrow at 1pm, a speeding track with a clever crossover,
01:07:40Japanese Grand Prix highlights from the Suzuka circuit. Next tonight, Bill Bailey's Vietnam.
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