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00:11I was working at the nuclear power station at Forsmark in Sweden.
00:21If you want to go into the controlled area, you had to put yourself in a monitor
00:26that checked if you had any radioactive contamination on you.
00:32This was just a normal procedure, but this morning the alarm went off.
00:39No one could get through because the alarm went off all the time.
00:45I didn't think it was really real.
00:49So I asked one of the guys who stood in the queue to borrow a shoe and started an analysis
00:57of it.
00:58The rate by which the peaks rise tells you about the radioactivity, and this time it was just...
01:08It was terrifying.
01:10The alarm went off to evacuate the station.
01:16At first, the Swedes thought that they had had a nuclear accident.
01:21Later, Swedish scientists determined the origin was somewhere in the Soviet Union.
01:36At first, the central hall of block number 4.
01:43Details are emerging this morning of the serious accident at a Soviet nuclear plant in the Ukraine.
01:49Up, up, up, up, up, and hold this place, hold it.
01:54It's being called the worst nuclear accident in history.
01:57A giant reactor has suffered what experts tonight believe to have been a core meltdown.
02:03Radiation, of course, is the big fear tonight.
02:06It is the silent killer, and apparently it continues to pour forth from Chernobyl.
02:11It can cause immediate sickness and death.
02:15There is a dramatic hike in a deadly form of thyroid cancer among children exposed to that radioactive fallout.
02:21The longer you live, eating and drinking in contaminated regions, the more radiation builds up in your body.
02:29Is it a meltdown, Mr. President?
02:32I can't comment now.
02:33President Reagan was out of the country, but then Vice President George Bush asked me how bad the reactor accident
02:40was.
02:41And I said, sir, in my opinion, as a nuclear engineer, this is the worst possible accident I can imagine.
02:53There were incredible acts of bravery and heroism, sacrifice and extreme patriotism.
03:03We lost our friends.
03:06We lost our neighbors.
03:09So many young people died.
03:12How do we actually understand what has happened if the Soviets won't tell us?
03:19This was a global disaster.
03:22Hundreds of millions of people wanted to know, am I in danger?
03:26Is the food safe to eat?
03:28And the Soviets were quiet.
03:33This was an unchecked nuclear core meltdown.
03:56Over the course of the last 40 years, I've never had an opportunity to speak about this in public before.
04:02As a CIA officer, we're not generally dealing with the media.
04:07In 1986, I had been a nuclear analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.
04:12I was 27 years old. I'd been working for the CIA for four years.
04:18I remember coming back from lunch on the Monday, April 28th,
04:23and the Soviets finally did acknowledge that there was a problem.
04:31It put out a statement saying there had been an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
04:35And that was a bit ominous because Chernobyl was a lot further away than the ones we initially suspected.
04:43Both the Swedish and Danish embassies sent envoys to the Soviet foreign ministry today,
04:48asking the Soviets to be more forthcoming.
04:50Wyatt Andrews, CBS News, Moscow.
04:53The entire diplomatic community and reporting community was bombarding the Soviet authorities for answers.
05:07We set out immediately to start tasking the resources that we had to learn more about it.
05:13Of course, we tasked the overhead reconnaissance satellites,
05:16which was not nearly as ubiquitous as they are today.
05:20So we had to go out and provide a justification to get the satellite in the picture.
05:25We kind of sold the ideas that, well, we might see emergency response crews and that sort of thing.
05:31The next morning, our senior nuclear power analyst got an excited call from the photo interpreters and said,
05:37the reactor's blown up, just like you said.
05:39And our reaction was, no, we lied about that.
05:42It couldn't have done that. That doesn't happen to reactors.
05:49The images showed that the building was completely destroyed.
05:54As a nuclear engineer, I was astounded that the thing would have exploded in that manner,
05:58and you would have this vast destruction.
06:02That kind of nuclear core explosion had never happened before.
06:06That emission of radiation had never happened before.
06:10That was horrifying.
06:16It's going to be a launch of a nuclear reactor.
06:19And then, a new field.
06:25Soviet propaganda had spent years insisting that the USSR's nuclear technology led the world.
06:33Construction began on the Chernobyl power plant in 1970.
06:39By 1986, there were four reactors online.
06:44One of the unique things was their extremely large physical size,
06:48much larger than similar reactors in the West.
06:53Each of the reactors produced 1,000 megawatts of electricity,
06:57which was enough to provide power to around a million modern homes.
07:04The plant was located at the northwest of Kyiv,
07:09around 800 miles from Foschmark in Sweden,
07:13where radiation from the accident was first detected in the West.
07:19You have an enormous plume of radioactive material that's coming across Europe.
07:24So we knew that because of the great distances,
07:26and the amount being received at those distances,
07:29this must be a very large release.
07:33It's hard to quantify the effect that these radioactive isotopes might have on your body and on your health.
07:42Even at lower levels, it can cause long-term effects, like cancer, that may show up years later.
07:52I remember seeing from the bus when I came back from Foschmark to Uppsala,
07:58I saw some children playing.
08:00I wanted to stop the bus and go out and ask them,
08:03don't play here.
08:06But it was not possible to stop that kind of bus.
08:13No one knew what that level of radiation spewing into the air would do to the atmosphere,
08:19and how far the contamination would spread, and how dangerous that might be.
08:28At Foschmark, we spoke a lot, everybody in the control room.
08:33The main thought was,
08:37what was it like to be in Chernobyl?
08:44In a power plant that had suffered such a fate.
09:14In the night of the accident, I worked with the senior engineer of the turbine engine 4-го block.
09:21I was 28 years old.
09:37Why did you stop for almost 40 years old?
09:42I left in another life.
09:45I didn't want to talk about the past.
10:12I went to work for about half a hour until the beginning of the operation.
10:17My place was on the right.
10:20There were two turbines in the right.
10:26We started to prepare an experiment.
10:33Reactor number four was scheduled to be shut down for routine maintenance,
10:38and the operators were taking the opportunity to conduct a long-delayed safety test.
10:47Ironically, the experiment was intended to allow them to have better reactor safety in the event of a loss of
10:54power.
10:57They had begun this experiment a day before the accident occurred.
11:04Unfortunately, the experiment was interrupted by the grid controller, who needed more electricity, so that the shutdown was prolonged.
11:15The delay meant that the test had to be conducted by the midnight shift.
11:38Alongside Igor Kirchenbaum, the two members of the shift, directly responsible for enacting the test, were Alexander Akimov, the head
11:47of the shift,
11:47and Leonid Toptenov controlling the reactor directly.
11:54The reactor was infamously unstable during the process of shutdown.
12:02Toptenov was not very experienced.
12:05He would be overseeing the shutdown of a nuclear reactor for the first time in his career.
12:13When the operations were released, the launch, the launch, the launch...
12:30They were tired and they were trying to get it done, because opportunities to do this kind of thing didn't
12:35occur very often.
12:38The most senior man in the room was Anatoly Dyatlov, who was deputy chief engineer for operations for the entire
12:44plant.
12:46There had been several disagreements about the test protocol, and the test had been delayed so long that part of
12:55the crew were threatening to leave.
12:59Dyatlov, who was never a good-tempered individual, had been awake for almost 24 hours.
13:07The last thing that Dyatlov said to Akimov before the test began was, what are you waiting for?
13:23By doing this, they went on to take place during the outbreak before the phase, and the recovery engineering system...
13:32...for the final step of the test, Toktenov pressed the AZ-5 scram button to shut the reactor...
13:33...and on.
13:33...and on.
13:37I have been enrolled by the crash maker here and operations because they didn't come to the process,
13:39For the final step of the test, Toptenov pressed the AZ-5 scram button to shut the reactor.
13:44of the time.
13:56There was an awful noise.
14:04Something happened, that no one could know.
14:20In 1986, it was 29 years old.
14:27It turned out that we were already in the evening,
14:29we began to patrol around the atomic station.
14:36We had an air conditioner at the atomic station.
14:41We saw two barconers,
14:44who were sent in the air.
14:48We had to take these two barconers from the air.
14:56It was about 400 meters from the reactor.
15:02But we took these two people.
15:06We heard a whistle on the back.
15:09He turned around.
15:11Almost all turned around.
15:14And the second whistle on the back.
15:20It was massive and dachte of the leak.
15:28With the smoke.
15:50At that moment the radiation warning lamps
15:54on the wall of the control room turned from green to red.
16:02We walked 200 meters and were standing near the 4th energy block.
16:09I said, my God, who left the building?
16:13It was removed, half cut it off.
16:24So it's 3-5?
16:27Allo?
16:283-4 block?
16:305-4 block
16:32In the result of the fire?
16:34Yes
16:35It's clear?
16:37Yes, it's clear
16:38It's clear
16:39We started to send various messages
16:44We brought a dead man
16:48It was Shashanok
16:52Vladimir Shashanok, who was monitoring the turbines, was engulfed in radioactive steam
16:59It was all wet and toned
17:03We drove him
17:06Then he died
17:10Yatlov also came and said
17:13I don't understand what happened
17:16There was no doubt
17:18Complete confusion in the control room
17:20All they knew that something was wrong
17:22But they didn't know what it was
17:26They certainly didn't believe that the reactor could have been destroyed
17:32The Chernobyl power plant was laid out around a long central corridor
17:38The four reactors in a line
17:42Each of the reactors had its own separate control room
17:45And each of the control rooms was separated from the reactor hall
17:49By many thick concrete walls
17:54Reactor 4
17:55Reactor 4
17:55For being obliterated
17:56Taking with it
17:58All of the sensors
17:59And equipment
17:59That was supposed to communicate to them
18:01What was happening inside the reactor core
18:05So they were completely in the dark
18:24To other sensors
18:24They were getting on the dark
18:25To the enemy
18:25He was getting out of theBoys
18:25And the Nazi war
18:26And the Nazi war
18:30We don't know
18:30We go up
18:32And the Nazi war
18:38We were trying to make together
18:42Not though
18:52We were trying to make the war
18:54they'd never seen before, this strange glow coming
18:57from the reactor core meltdown.
19:21Those firefighters put their lives on the line, very much
19:24like the firefighters at the World Trade Center on 9-11.
19:27I mean, they knew what they were getting into,
19:28and they went and did it anyway.
19:57There was a fire, there was a fire.
20:00It was like a fire.
20:07There was a little bit of trouble in us,
20:09so we couldn't handle this situation.
20:12We didn't know how much radiation was on me.
20:25Radiation as an intangible, odorless, potentially lethal force is the invisible enemy.
20:34The most frightening and lethal form of radiation is gamma rays, which will pass straight through
20:40the body like a fusillade of machine gun bullets, tearing apart the body at the cellular level,
20:47damaging DNA as it goes.
20:49Those can cause fatal injuries, even from a very great distance, and cannot be stopped
20:55by anything short of thick sheets of lead or massive concrete blocks.
21:03In the immediate aftermath of the accident, pieces of the reactor itself were emitting fields
21:09of radiation of thousands of Ronjun an hour, enough to cause a fatal dose to anyone who
21:15stood nearby for a matter of minutes.
21:20We had no mask, no one was only a fire, only a fire was a fire, and everything,
21:26and everything.
21:28There was no clothing, nothing.
21:33There's 10000 square feet.
21:36They say that these crmis were all the core.
21:41They are all four blocks.
21:44We targeted them to the 40 square feet.
21:47We put all the zone in the area.
21:51We saw it like the flames,
21:54and we went through the roof of a mall,
22:05They were there armed with water and foam,
22:08which is what you would bring to an industrial fire.
22:27You can explain?
22:27Oh, what's that scary?
22:29Here is a other one.
22:34There is one, they say, where are the gloves?
22:36They are not afraid.
22:38Let's put gloves on, let's put water.
22:40What's that scary?
22:42It's scary as it was a fight.
22:49There is a danger of...
22:52Huh?
22:53There is a danger of strong radioactive protection.
22:59The fields of radiation on the roofs of the reactor buildings were so intense that almost
23:05immediately some members of the fire crews came down with symptoms of acute radiation
23:09syndrome and were taken from the scene already vomiting.
23:27People in the control room still didn't really fully understand exactly what had happened even
23:34hours after the explosion had taken place.
24:08The reactor was not receiving any cooling water that would cause a reactor meltdown.
24:15So they became fixated at that point on getting water into the reactor, but the gate valves
24:23on the cooling system had to be turned manually.
24:29Akimov and Toptunov left the control room and went out to try to open valves and establish
24:35new ways of cooling the reactor.
24:40And they spent a long time there in enormous fields of gamma radiation.
24:45What they didn't realize was that opening the valves was a complete waste of time.
24:52Unfortunately, the reactor was already destroyed and there was nothing they could have done
24:56that would have helped.
25:00Akimov and Toptunov both received lethal doses of radiation.
25:06They died a few weeks later.
25:11They gave their lives in the effort to try to do what they could.
25:18Akimov and Toptunov should be alive in the morning of April 26th.
25:38Akimov and Toptunov was underline and a remastered fire in the roof of the reactor building had
25:41been extinguished.
25:44The firefighters saved Reactor Building 3 and the rest of the complex.
25:49And I have nothing but admiration for these firefighters,
25:52many of whom died in the days and weeks to come.
26:08When it was 7 o'clock in the morning, there was already an explosion.
26:14And all of them went down from the roof.
26:19And then it fell down, and then it fell down.
26:24It fell down, and then it fell down, and then it fell down, and then it fell down, and then
26:35it fell down, and then it fell down, and then it fell down.
26:43Among the firefighters who went to the roof of Unit 3, several received lethal doses of radiation.
26:51It fell down, and then it fell down, and then it fell down.
26:54And each of them said, live or not, live or not.
26:57If it's there, it's there.
27:00These firefighters, they were cooking, they were cooking.
27:24The reactor top shield was two or three meters thick, and it weighed more than 2,000 tons.
27:30That whole thing got blown into the air like 100 meters.
27:362,000 tons, so, you know, the amount of energy released was quite impressive.
27:46186 firemen managed to extinguish everything that they found burning on the roofs of the
27:51reactor building and in the grounds, but something still remained on fire.
28:02The fire in the reactor core was not out, and that was a much hotter fire and much more
28:09difficult to deal with.
28:41The closest town was Pripyat, three kilometers from the Chernobyl power plant itself.
28:48There were no official announcements from that morning notifying anybody that an accident had
28:53taken place.
28:55People went about their business in Pripyat just as they always would on a fine spring
29:00morning.
29:03No one was telling them that they were in mortal danger.
29:11Our apartment was two kilometers from the power plant, so it was very close.
29:19In 1986, I was eight years old.
29:29Pripyat was built to serve the power plant.
29:34It was a happy city, I would say, many children, many flowers.
29:44They planted lots of roses.
29:47I was photographed in front of them for the town brochure.
29:57When the accident happened, I worked as the main architect of the city of Pripyat.
30:08I was, let's say, the main architect of the city of Pripyat is to see the future of the city
30:14of Pripyat.
30:18In general, the residents of the city of Pripyat were young people, and our average age was 27 years old.
30:29And from here, what is young people?
30:32It means love, it means many children.
30:50We woke up as normal, and as usual, we went to school.
30:57Soviet schools were open on Saturday mornings, so everybody who was present was exposed to radioactive contamination.
31:07Before the accident, we never talked about safety measures.
31:12The power plant was perceived as the safest thing.
31:17No one would ever consider that something dangerous may happen.
31:29At school, there was no panic or anything.
31:33The teacher gave us iodine pills.
31:38They said that we have to take it.
31:40There was not a proper explanation for what and why.
31:47We went to the toilet, and we actually threw it away, because why would we need to take pills?
31:53It's not fun.
31:55We were released earlier, but with strict rules to go home.
32:01It's spring, the weather is nice, and we were happy, like, wow, no school anymore.
32:22At around 9 o'clock on Saturday morning, officials from the local government were summoned to a meeting at which
32:30it was explained that everybody should go about their business as normal, and above all, no one should panic.
33:01Radiation readings were being taken by Soviet troops, who spread out around the city.
33:14Radiation Eft tense
33:19Film footage shot in Pripyat on the 26th and 27th of April bears bright white flashes that appear to be
33:27the result of radiation striking the film.
33:54The Soviet authorities wanted to keep everything that happened
33:58at Chernobyl as secret as possible.
34:02They placed police roadblocks around the city of Pripyat and quite quickly the KGB cut
34:07off the telephone lines so that nobody could even phone out.
34:13The Soviet response to any kind of problem was to try to cover it up until they could
34:18figure out something to do.
34:23As the scale of the disaster became increasingly apparent, responsibility for dealing with
34:29the accident was escalated to Moscow.
34:36The Central Committee in Moscow was meeting nonstop.
34:42They commissioned a government commission.
35:06Sklarov was a senior government minister who answered directly to the head of the Communist
35:10Party of Ukraine.
35:12It was part of the first wave of senior government officials sent to the plant to find out exactly
35:18what had happened and clean up the consequences.
35:23I was on all meetings of the committee, no exception.
35:28In Pripyat, I met my head of the minister, and we went to the 4th block.
35:38I stood up and couldn't believe in my eyes.
35:43I was on the floor, but I was on the floor.
35:47I was on the floor.
35:56if you take yourself to two o'clock it's unbelievable what the soviet high command knew
36:03they knew the nuclear core was emitting phenomenal amounts of radiation into the atmosphere
36:09they knew the town of pripyat was being bombarded with that radiation and did not tell the people
36:17of the region anything
36:26momi kazali miezki lasti show niakoi paniki все заплановано по місту проводите свадьбу проводить
36:45я не закахався в верину ще на площі був вражено її вродою той же вечер запропонував їй подружитись
37:03ну тому у другий дня в нас була запланована розпис
37:10і це було останнє весілля в припяті
37:14ось це був і не був
37:35completely unprepared for what they found there.
38:01There was this communication between what's going on
38:05in Moscow and what was going on in the scene.
38:08There was not a lot of honesty and there was a lot of friction in the system,
38:11and so I think that hampered the response initially.
38:14We saw this in terms of the delay in evacuating the towns.
38:21The members of the government commission were arguing about whether or not they should
38:25evacuate the population at Pripyat.
38:27This is principally driven by the need for secrecy, because they didn't want word of
38:32what had happened to leak out, along with members of the population leaving the area.
38:39There was no sign of something that happened so serious.
38:44There was nothing, absolutely.
38:46It was an absolutely normal life.
38:51Someone had married a marriage somewhere, I saw it.
39:06Someone had to stay.
39:11How did he get out of that situation?
39:11I was MASTER.
39:13We became married, as a husband and wife.
39:20We became married.
39:22It was a wedding.
39:23It was a wedding this evening.
39:39The radiation situation in Pripyat grew gradually worse as the day wore on.
39:44So by the evening, there were extremely high radiation readings being taken.
39:52Word was beginning to reach people in the town that something had happened, but the scale of the accident was
40:00not apparent really to anyone.
40:06And we went to this apartment, exhausted, but happy.
40:11We were able to get to the house and get to the house.
40:16We were able to get to the house and get to the house.
40:16This is my bucket of truands.
40:19They all were burnt and just like burning.
40:27I put these truands in the bath so they could have gone there maybe in the evening.
40:35By the end of Saturday, the Pripyat council themselves began making preparations in case an evacuation became necessary.
41:03They sent out for every bus they could find on very little notice. You have to see that in hindsight
41:11as impressive.
41:23By the end of Saturday evening, the head of the government commission still refused to sanction an evacuation or inform
41:30the population about what was happening.
41:32Even as hundreds of buses were summoned, the majority of the population remained at home waiting for news of what
41:40would happen next.
41:51I remember there was an unusual view on the power plant.
41:57And I said, Mom, is it on fire?
42:00She was a little bit rough saying like, shut up.
42:06And I understood like, oh, something really is going on.
42:10But we just went to bed like it was a normal southern guy.
42:21The Soviets expected to be able to contain the story, even though they had a core nuclear meltdown.
42:29The Soviets were dealing with a nuclear disaster of unprecedented proportions.
42:34It had to be dealt with.
42:36Thousands of workers were brought in and informed, you're going to be heroes of the Soviet Union, get to work.
42:44Radioactive material was melting through and could make its way to the groundwater.
42:48That would have ruined farming and agriculture for decades.
42:56We saw all kinds of desperate measures.
42:59Coal miners were brought in to dig a tunnel under the reactor.
43:03They were asking helicopter pilots to drive right into blasts of radiation and try to contain the effects of this
43:13explosion.
43:16With the fire in the core still burning, plumes of smoke laden with radioactive material are going into the atmosphere.
43:24This was a threat to the entire planet.
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