- 3 weeks ago
Chernobyl Days That Shocked the World S01E02
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00:00The
00:00The
00:16Did
00:19Hear
00:21The
00:22The
00:22The
00:22It is
00:23exploding
00:23There is no
00:26Reactor unit number 4
00:44The temperatures in the reactor core were hot enough that the fuel would melt, like a lava,
00:50but a highly radioactive lava.
00:55The sarcophagus was built over the destroyed reactor, but was essentially propped up like a house of cards,
01:03and it was recognized that this was one day going to collapse.
01:06We've seen those brave workers putting the construction together.
01:11We have seen the arch in a nearly ready state.
01:30The fear that there will be another Chernobyl, it's enough just to say that word.
01:35And that means we're going to get affected.
01:53The Chernobyl disaster on the 26th of April 1986 was the worst nuclear accident in history.
02:02The explosion left wreckage on the ground that will remain radioactive for 20,000 years
02:09and blasted a cloud of contaminated dust into the sky.
02:15There was really not that much appreciation in the first, not even just days and weeks,
02:22but even the first years of the extent of fallout that had occurred at quite some distance,
02:29hundreds of kilometers away from the nuclear plant.
02:36Chernobyl remains the worst nuclear accident in history,
02:39but at the time, the Soviet state deliberately concealed the danger.
02:45Somewhere, a clear decision was made to not tell the people.
02:55Ala Kravchuk grew up near the plant and was studying music in Kyiv when the crisis hit.
03:02When the accident has happened, nobody was informed.
03:07We did not know about it until a few days later.
03:12We prepared the end-of-year exam, and I am a singer.
03:17So I was extremely sensitive to this dryness in the stroke,
03:23but of course that was nothing to do with the physical condition.
03:27It was something which was not visible, but everybody felt it.
03:32Alla discovered what was happening, not from an official source,
03:37but from evacuees fleeing her former hometown of Pripyat.
03:41I learned then from my school friends in Pripyat
03:44that they were greeted by somebody in a hurry saying,
03:48what are you doing? Have you not heard?
03:50There was an accident and the buses are about to arrive.
03:55We have to leave.
03:57This town of 50,000, built for Chernobyl's workers,
04:01was now dangerously radioactive.
04:05You have got levels that are absolutely, definitely exceeding
04:10the level you would allow people to be present in
04:14because of the agreed significance of the cancer risk.
04:19Yet, critical workers like control room operator Alexi Brias agreed to stay
04:25to prevent a new crisis in Chernobyl's other three reactors.
04:30After 26 January, I worked for two days on the third block.
04:40I and others were doing the freezing of the third reactor.
04:43He was stopped immediately after the explosion.
04:46But I had to have to do it for a long time,
04:48to reduce the temperature gradually.
04:52In the evening after the change, I returned to Pripyat.
04:56There was no people.
04:58There is no people.
04:58Well, I'm sure they left in the city the operators,
05:01the fires, the police.
05:04Then we had taken the decision to eventually evacuate the operators.
05:15Within days, only cleanup crews, known as liquidators,
05:19remained in a 30-kilometer exclusion zone.
05:22As they worked, radioactive debris continued to billow
05:27from the wreckage of Reactor Unit 4.
05:30Chemist Valery Suleimov evacuated soon after the explosion.
05:35Maybe end of May, the Soviet government decided
05:39to put some steel structures above
05:44to get the kind of dome over the destroyer.
05:50It was a shelter called a sarcophagus.
05:55Ala's father, Volodymyr, who'd helped to build Chernobyl,
05:58worked on the designs for the sarcophagus,
06:00or object shelter, as it was officially known.
06:04Dad was allocated specifically for this job
06:07to create the up-to-date picture.
06:11What is Reactor looking like now?
06:14What was the parameters?
06:16What was the current situation?
06:19It was extremely difficult to get original drawings.
06:23Because most of them were at the station,
06:26and they were contaminated or non-existent.
06:32We are looking now at the drawings my dad was working,
06:38and the measurements had to be certified very meticulously,
06:42and then see the changes that were done after the explosion.
06:49We are looking at the exploded reactor.
06:53This is what had to be covered,
06:56because the lid was blown up
06:58and has landed in a very odd position.
07:04Dad had a very clear understanding that you have to be there.
07:14The first stage was to get large concrete slabs up against the building.
07:22You basically built a concrete shell with a roof over the top of it
07:27that would act as a reasonable containment of dust and vapors.
07:34More than 90,000 people took part in this building activity.
07:41They were not plant staff.
07:43It was builders from all over the Soviet Union.
07:53So it means approximately 200 days
07:58from the decision to completion of this facility.
08:03It's very, very fast.
08:06It's incredibly fast.
08:09Meanwhile, Chernobyl's three other reactors
08:12were ordered back online to deal with power shortages.
08:15So plant workers returned to the exclusion zone,
08:20including nuclear chemists Valery and his wife Helena.
08:27Our management told us,
08:30you can go to Chernobyl.
08:33It was nothing to do this destroyer reactor.
08:37We did our regular work as before the accident
08:42for unit 1, 2 and 3.
08:45Yes, it was a feeling that if we were not we,
08:49then we should do it.
08:51We did it.
08:54And we started to work in this system.
08:57Two weeks you work at the plant,
09:01and two weeks away.
09:04We had respirators.
09:06We changed clothes.
09:08We used to travel all the time.
09:10We used to travel to the stations
09:11in respirators,
09:13in protective clothes.
09:15So, well,
09:16we knew where we are,
09:21and what we need to do,
09:22and in what conditions we are.
09:24and we are not going to do it.
09:27For that time,
09:29reactor 4 was confined
09:31by this object shelter,
09:33and we did nothing for reactor 4.
09:36Nothing.
09:39But for workers who were on the front line
09:42after unit 4 exploded,
09:44like Alexei,
09:45there was no longer a place at Chernobyl.
09:49At first, the official death toll was just two,
09:52killed by the end of the day.
09:54I was supposed to work on the rocket,
09:57I was supposed to work on the rocket.
09:58So it was a very hard time
09:58to work on the rocket.
10:00There was no radiation control
10:02under the right eye,
10:04and I was supposed to be
10:06in the right eye,
10:06and the bloods,
10:07and my eyes.
10:09There was no permanent disease.
10:11There was no real disease.
10:13At first, the official death toll was just two, killed by the explosion.
10:19But shortly after, Dr. Alexander Bugar had treated others with extreme radiation burns.
10:54Although now far from Chernobyl, Dr. Bugar had been in close contact with many of the victims.
11:22The death toll was later revised to 30.
11:25But some experts believe thousands died from radiation exposure, with thousands more getting ill.
11:31All these diseases are chronic, all these from the radiofobia, because we all were afraid, and on this emotional stress,
11:39we were developing chronic diseases, which had been in the hospital.
11:45We began problems, pain in the body, main pain.
11:51My mother recalls that I had no doubt, and she then took me to the hospital and sent me to
11:57the hospital.
11:58If I took my child's medical card, it would be more, I don't know, than war and war.
12:08Widespread health problems were just one aspect of a vast Soviet cover-up.
12:16In the weeks after Chernobyl, the secret services moved to conceal the evidence behind the disaster.
12:22The KGB came in and all the scientists were told,
12:26this must not be released, you must not discuss this,
12:30what records have you kept, and they were all removed from.
12:35After the crash, I, and the other engineers who worked in the KGB,
12:43we were forced to sign the KGB to sign a document.
12:49We were forced to talk about the original, the real cause of the crash on the Chernobyl.
13:00Three months later, Soviet investigators briefed the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA,
13:08and clearly pointed the finger.
13:10Okay.
13:11The UNjin stroked the American army, and the U.C.
13:15And the Czech Republic was told,
13:17that the UN doctor'd been told us,
13:17it was like the town of the crash,
13:23the UN did not say anything to the medical conditions.
13:27The UN does not really mean to the government,
13:28And that the UN did not feel like it was,
13:33it was very PUBLIC,
13:34and the UN's OKCAP.
13:42Alongside operator errors, the report also hinted at problems with the reactor's design.
13:49This was indeed a very specific Soviet type of reactor.
13:55The light, water, graphite, moderated reactor, or RBMK type.
14:02In all reactors, neutrons split atoms in fuel rods, releasing heat which boils water, producing steam to spin a generator.
14:13In most designs, the water helps maintain a steady flow of neutrons, keeping the reaction going.
14:38All reactors use control rods to absorb neutrons, which slows the reaction down.
14:45If you take control rods out, the power will rise. If you put them in, it should decrease.
14:51It's like driving a car, a little bit of fine tuning, just a bit to the left, a bit on
14:56the accelerator, a bit on the brake.
14:58Same with the reactor.
15:01Unusually, the RBMK also used graphite to help manage neutron flow, in blocks surrounding the fuel rods, and on the
15:10end of each control rod.
15:15This mix of both water and the graphite was really quite unique, and had been studied in the West, and
15:22very definitely was known by 1986 to have quite potentially dangerous operating conditions.
15:32There were situations of the positioning of the control rods where you couldn't get them in fast enough, you wouldn't
15:38be able to slow the reaction.
15:40Concerningly, these situations included when the emergency stop or scram button was hit.
16:09But reactor designs were a state secret. So most staff at Chernobyl were not told about this serious flaw.
16:17Of course, the Soviet Union got round that by saying, here's the rule book, don't operate in those regimes.
16:25Because the psychology was, the rule would not be disobeyed.
16:30On the 25th of April, ahead of planned maintenance, unexpected events tore up the rule book.
16:38It had been decided that the Chernobyl reactor in late April would conduct an experiment related to how you bring
16:47a reactor back after there had been perhaps a power cut externally.
16:54So they started on the 26th to reduce the power from 3,200 megawatts down to half.
17:04At that time, they got a telephone call from the electricity board in Kiev, who had noted that a normal
17:13or non-nuclear power station had broken down.
17:17So they said, could you please stop?
17:22This pause was not part of the plan. There were no rules to follow.
17:27Even so, once the power shortage passed, the test resumed.
17:32So the internal configuration of the reactor is being changed and adjusted to help try to make the experiment work.
17:40But it is producing what resulted in this unstable condition.
17:46The reactivity started to happen, which made the reactor just increasing and increasing in power.
17:58Realising the reactor was out of control, operator Leonid Toptonov hit the scram button, exposing that catastrophic design flaw.
18:07When that scram button was hit, the control rods were going to drop, so that these rods should soak up
18:13all the neutrons.
18:14The only problem was the first bit to enter the reactor had graphite, and that graphite that came in further
18:20increased the neutron population in the core.
18:25So you were then into a thermal runaway, producing a lot of steam, massive amount of steam.
18:30There is a massive expansion, and that produces a huge force, enough to lift and blow the lid off the
18:38reactor.
18:43All these materials that were inside the fuel rods, all that radioactivity is now up in the sky.
19:07The reactor operator, to their death, said they didn't understand what had happened, they thought they'd done everything according to
19:19procedures.
19:22As new information came to light, the IAEA issued a revised report, suggesting Soviet authorities had deliberately downplayed problems with
19:33the reactor design.
19:34There was a human error associated with what happened at Chernobyl, but there was also a design fault.
19:40The explosion was due to the fact that there was an attempt to stop the reactor with an electric button.
19:48But through the reactor, it didn't stop the reactor, it exploded.
19:57Of course, the people who were in the control room at the time thought that whatever they were doing, there
20:03was a single solution if it was going really wrong, which was the SCRAM button.
20:18I've stood in that control room, wearing PPE and mask etc.
20:23I've stood with my hand over where that SCRAM button was.
20:28And that kind of, for me, put it all into perspective.
20:32Genuinely, at that point in time, they didn't know that pressing that button was going to cause this incident.
20:39We all understood that the reasons are not in mistakes of operators.
20:43We understood that the reasons that the Soviet Union Union said effectively are not true,
20:52but true are the reasons we have to stop.
20:54It's not true.
20:55While the Soviets withheld information and deflected blame for Chernobyl, winds had blown radioactive dust across Europe.
21:04And as news of the cover-up also began to spread, faith in nuclear power plunged.
21:11Chernobyl is a big sort of PR disaster with regards to nuclear technology.
21:18It just had so many impacts.
21:21Some countries stopped their nuclear energy.
21:24The fear that there will be another Chernobyl.
21:28It's enough just to say that word.
21:30And that means we're going to get affected.
21:32We might get radioactivity.
21:35We might get cancer because of this.
21:39Closer to home, the crisis deepened mistrust of the entire Soviet system.
21:56The Chernobyl accident caused a lot of concerns and doubt, particularly in Ukraine and in Belarus over the manner in
22:06which their republics were controlled from Moscow.
22:09And the call for independence rose all the greater when they realised how the Chernobyl accident had been managed.
22:19The Chernobyl incident was almost like the sort of straw that broke the camel's back when it comes to the
22:24fall of the Soviet Union.
22:35Once the Soviet Union disintegrated, hoping to learn the true scale of the disaster, former republics opened their doors to
22:43foreign scientists.
22:44At that time it was very important for international observers to come in because by then the people were tired
22:52of being lied to, tired of not getting all the information.
22:58In 1991 I got the chance to go to Chernobyl on a research project where we wanted to measure in
23:07the environment and also study the effects of shielding in the buildings in Pripyat, for example.
23:16I made my first entry into the zone and did some sample collection.
23:25And you saw mostly deserted houses.
23:31Workers weren't living there, because if you lived there you'd get radioactivity 24 hours a day.
23:36But if you went in just for a few hours in a day you'd get low enough levels that were
23:41tolerable for the work, just all part of a job that has a certain level of risk.
23:48That was an experience which was mixed feelings, I think, because we went into apartments and you could see dolls
23:57and things from kids who were suddenly taken away.
24:03It was a funny feeling to see the empty town.
24:06In 1992, Alexander Sirota, training as a journalist, returned to Pripyat for the first time since the disaster.
24:16And I went to go to the city, to the streets, which were for me very important and important.
24:22And in the same time there was such a very important transformation.
24:27I only then realized that we would never return to the city.
24:33And at some point we started looking for the lost archives and it just became interesting.
24:38And in the amateur cinema studio, Pripyat Film, which worked at the local cultural palace.
24:44This archive was actually lost.
24:47Alexander searched for a decade before finding an archivist from Pripyat Film with a treasure trove of footage from their
24:54hometown.
24:54He was not very much in the same conditions.
24:58He was somewhere in the apartment, in the basement, in the basement, in the basement.
25:03And at some point, again, the personal circumstances, he was able to find those who buy this archive.
25:12And he was like the money.
25:30This footage reveals a colourful vision of life in Pripyat before radiation forced residents to flee.
25:44In 1993, I participated in an expedition to the Chernobyl.
25:50This town is the town of Pripyat, as you see, is a very sad town, because there are no inhabitants
25:57here.
25:58We measured radioactivity in the air in the 30-kilometre zone around the Chernobyl directory
26:05to see how dangerous it was.
26:08I had a higher dose rate on the flight from Stockholm to Kyiv than I had when working in the
26:16city, or 30-kilometre zone.
26:19But when I visited the sarcophagus, then the dose rate went up, way up.
26:26Ten times.
26:27The concrete and steel shelter, built to cover Reactor 4's radioactive wreckage, was starting to fail.
26:39Chernobyl's sarcophagus, meant to last 30 years, was crumbling after just 10.
26:49The sarcophagus was essentially propped up together, so it was like a house of cards.
26:54It had holes in it, and over time, it slowly got worse and worse.
27:00And it was recognised that this was slowly, slowly declining and one day going to collapse.
27:06A collapse would throw up a new cloud of radioactive debris, which could spread across Europe once again.
27:15Because of the physical degradation of the object shelter, it was decided to cover the envelope to prevent uncontrolled release
27:25contamination to the atmosphere.
27:28The international community recognised that Ukraine was in an intensely vulnerable position in the mid to late 90s,
27:36and was trying to deal with the consequences of the accident.
27:38And there was an act of solidarity with Ukraine to support them to say that we want to stand with
27:43you to provide some sort of long-term solution.
27:46That solution was a vast arch called the New Safe Confinement, costing $1.7 billion.
27:54Simon Evans helped manage the project for the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development.
28:00The arch had two core functions. One was to confine the remnants of the destroyed unit 4.
28:07But the second one was to provide all the equipment and facilities for long-term decommissioning of the remnants of
28:15the reactor.
28:21I met Simon Evans in the very beginning of the NSC project. He was the supervisor for the bank. I
28:29was on the contractor side.
28:31My role was to coordinate designers and we did together the design documents.
28:40Radiation protection and safety for workers was our key priority throughout the construction.
28:46There was one area where we were hitting levels that meant workers could work there for around 4 minutes a
28:52day.
28:53So the arch was built 400 metres away to protect workers from the impact of radiation as you got closer
28:59to the old sarcophagus.
29:06It was quite exciting times. It was romantic times, I would say.
29:14Because you see one of the largest facilities in the world growing up every day, every year.
29:21Well, I'm proud of it, that Valery started working there.
29:26And he worked there from the first day until the last day.
29:30And it's good that the Western countries have gathered and started to develop this safe confinement.
29:40and then building this arch.
29:43Because to figure out the 4th block, to figure out everything that is under there,
29:49it wouldn't be able to be in Ukraine.
29:56I had been back to Pripyat in 2015.
30:01And the new confinement was nearly ready.
30:07And that was an extraordinary, exciting time.
30:11We wanted to see it in real life.
30:14And we were safely taken into the Chernobyl zone.
30:19We've seen those brave, scaffolding workers putting the construction together.
30:25For the first time in decades, Chernobyl was crawling with life.
30:33New life had also taken over the abandoned town of Pripyat.
30:41I could not help asking if it's possible to drive and see my house.
30:47The answer was, the area where our house was is a jungle now.
30:53So it was not approachable, but I was promised to be taken as close as possible.
31:03I saw the ruins of the central concert hall, where I used to go to various concert events.
31:13And the beautiful mosaic was there, but all the windows were crushed.
31:19Exclusion zones are like zombie films, but without the zombies.
31:23In that Mother Nature very, very quickly takes over.
31:28Something breaks inside you when you see this happen.
31:33And you walk along the streets where everything was blossoming in roses and wonderful open spaces.
31:41And the trees are growing, breaking the asphalt.
31:45Nature was claiming back its territory.
31:49It's a sort of stark reminder of how fragile human society is.
31:57It was like a ghost town.
32:00It wasn't at that beautiful place that once I knew.
32:12Six years after construction began on the new safe confinement, the arch was complete.
32:19But to cover the radioactive wreckage, it had to be slid into place.
32:23A two-week job.
32:26We were constantly told by the engineers, don't you dare put us under pressure to do this fast.
32:32We're going to do this correctly.
32:33And that's what we allowed them to do.
32:37It was amazing, to be perfectly honest, because you had this world's biggest movable structure inching in synchrony.
32:44It was really something quite spectacular.
32:49And they did it.
32:51This enormous structure came to the final place and was fixed there.
32:58It was so exciting.
33:04It was intensely complicated, but it happened.
33:09When it slid over the old reactor, many people described it as healing a wound that enabled Ukraine to look
33:14to the future with the confidence that they had the infrastructure required to deal with the lethal inheritance of Chernobyl.
33:23The arch was designed to last 100 years, which is long enough to slowly and very carefully dismantle the contaminated
33:31ruins inside.
33:34You can think about the decommissioning challenge of Chernobyl as being like trying to eat a mammoth.
33:39The only way you can eat a mammoth is a small chunk at a time.
33:45The idea was to essentially use hanging robotic systems to reach down and start to physically take the top off
33:52the sarcophagus and then reach into the core.
33:55And grab by grab, remove the residual graphite and fuel materials.
34:02If you don't have the confinement, any aerosols that you make will escape into the air.
34:06They'll be carried by the wind and you have no control over where that material goes.
34:12A year later, Tom Scott brought more state-of-the-art technology to the clean-up effort.
34:19This is Spot. This is our four-legged robot friend.
34:23We were the first people in the world to take a Spot robot and deploy it on a nuclear site.
34:28It just happened to be Chernobyl, which is also the most notorious.
34:34So the purpose really of what we're doing is to use robots to go into places that are dangerous enough
34:40that you don't want to send a human being.
34:44We went into the space around the sarcophagus so that we could control Spot and read out what he was
34:50recording.
34:52It was an amazing experience. I was always struck every time that we went in.
34:57It's a bit like a cathedral. It's so big and it's so quiet.
35:04This is a really historical place. People have died there.
35:08But it's just the size of it and the silence is really striking.
35:13There is one object buried here, which only a robot like Spot can safely inspect.
35:20The temperatures in the reactor core were hot enough that the fuel would melt.
35:24In this material, it flows essentially a bit like a lava, but a highly radioactive lava.
35:30It's what we call corium because it's molten core material.
35:34And it flowed down into the basement and quite famously it formed a structure called the elephant's foot,
35:39which is an incredibly radioactive structure.
35:41And the intensity is such that if you were going to spend several minutes next to it, then radiation sickness
35:48would be quite likely.
35:51What we were working towards was getting a better understanding of the degradation of the material and potentially even retrieving
35:59that material as part of decommissioning to allow us to start to contain the risk a lot better.
36:08The reactor is just one source of intense radiation that must eventually be cleaned up.
36:15Tom and his team also studied several others across the exclusion zone.
36:21After the liquidators finished with all of their efforts, all of the vehicles, the helicopters, they were all congregated together
36:29in this graveyard and they still sit there today.
36:34There are some tankers which still have radioactive inventory inside the tanks.
36:39Those are some of the most radioactive things on the site in fact.
36:42So there's a really big decommissioning job there to be done which will take many decades.
36:50With the arch secure and international experts collaborating on the cleanup, Chernobyl became a symbol of hope instead of fear.
37:08I woke up because a friend of mine who is Russian has called to say, I'm really sorry.
37:16And I, at that moment, I didn't understand what what she means.
37:22She said, I'm sure it will be over and everything will be fine.
37:27Please forgive.
37:29I said, what do you mean?
37:31And that was the morning when Russian troopers have attacked Ukraine.
37:39In February 2022, the Russian army entered Ukraine and swiftly headed for Chernobyl.
37:48A call from my son from Canada.
37:51Hey there, are you sleeping?
37:53It was around 6am.
37:57Yes, I'm still sleeping.
37:59War is started.
38:05My insider at Chernobyl plant showed me the picture of the camera from the main entrance to the administrative building
38:14of the plant.
38:15And I saw the Russian tanks on the square before the administrative building.
38:23Chernobyl was the first site occupied as a result of the invasion because they came down through Belarus and it
38:30enabled them to have a direct line to Kyiv.
38:35The majority of the nuclear infrastructure was left undamaged.
38:39However, there was a tremendous amount of damage to non-nuclear infrastructure.
38:44Roads, for example, bridges.
38:47Site access fundamentally compromised.
38:49A lot of looting and damage of, for example, computers, fire equipment, all this sort of stuff which put the
38:56site in a tremendously fragile state.
38:59The Russians also besieged the town of Slavutich, where most Chernobyl workers were living, as were Valery and Helena Sulimov.
39:08When they captured the CS, they broke the line that went to Slavutich.
39:15We were five days without electricity, without water, without heating.
39:24It was cold, dark and scary.
39:27And it was scary.
39:30And on March 25, the Russian troops came to the WTR.
39:37There were several tanks, there were several tanks.
39:40They went there.
39:44In the social networks, our friends started telling each other,
39:51that we were going to get on the street, on the protest meeting.
39:55We crowded in one place.
39:59Then we rolled out the big, big flag of Ukraine.
40:04And we went to the Russian soldiers.
40:13We heard some gunshot machine guns.
40:20And then they pulled out the grenades.
40:26From there, officers came.
40:28They stood there.
40:29We moved to them and shouted,
40:32home, home, home, home, and go home.
40:35Home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home.
40:57The retreating Russians ransacked Chernobyl.
41:08The retreating Russians ransacked Chernobyl.
41:35They left the arch and its deadly contents unharmed.
41:39However, as the war dragged on, tactics changed.
41:57On the 14th of February, in the early hours of the morning,
42:00a Russian drone hit the north side of the confinement.
42:07This drone attack, 14th of February this year, I was completely destroyed.
42:16I was absolutely horrified.
42:19The drone hit the facility and it caused a fire on the membrane in the cladding,
42:26which spread all across the north side of the arch
42:29and also spread over to the south side and damaged the ceiling membrane of the arch.
42:40The main volume of the arch underneath the arch is kept under pressure so that you have the air,
42:47the tendency for the air never to go outside to minimise the release of radioactive contamination from the old facilities.
42:57So when you burst a hole in the side and you start a fire,
43:00what happens is the fire gets sucked through the structure.
43:03And so there's very, very significant fire damage on the inside.
43:11One of the problems was that it wasn't just the area where the drone hit.
43:16In order to put out the fires, the fire brigade had to cut some 300 holes in the steel structure
43:21of the arch.
43:23And that could have led to some radioactive material escaping out into the air.
43:29The two core design functions of the arch have been fundamentally compromised
43:33and the 100-year design life-technical arch has been basically destroyed.
43:40I felt everything.
43:43I was angry, I was shocked.
43:45I didn't know what to do, what I can do, and what the consequences might be.
43:55There were thousands of people working there to create this.
43:59And there was a drone that needed to destroy the work of thousands of people for so many years.
44:09I do not believe we can get the full design functionality,
44:15but we will try to be as close as possible.
44:20All that the Russians are now doing is an act of nonsense,
44:27it is an act of barbarism, an act of violence, an act of humanity.
44:31The arch is just a small part of what they have already destroyed in Ukraine.
44:39So to speak about it, to talk about it, to say some words, it is almost impossible.
44:51The drone strike and the war have left an uncertain future both for Chernobyl and the people who have lived
44:59with its legacy for four decades.
45:03In the year of Chernobyl catastrophe, when we were much younger than today, it was a kind of adventure.
45:16Really, we did not feel the fear.
45:23I am proud that I was committed to it. It is really wonderful.
45:29We helped to deal with what it was there.
45:35What did you do, people who did this as well?
45:38The work of a church in the nice warm-upükkaya.
45:48I think that it is a tragic event in my life.
45:56So to speak to what it is, to be a celebration of the life of such a big intercession,
46:15Forgotten heroes and critical choices, the world's biggest clean-up after the world's
46:20worst accident, Chernobyl, 48 hours to escape is streaming now, 9 o'clock tomorrow and both
46:26international relations and a credibility in ruins, the concluding part of Suez, 24 hours
46:32that broke the British Empire. Celeb Gogglebox is here next.
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