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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 that checked if
00:27you had any radioactive contamination on you.
00:33This was just a normal procedure, but this morning the alarm went off.
00:40No one could get through because the alarm went off all the time.
00:45I didn't think it was really real.
00:50So I asked one of the guys who stood in the queue to borrow a shoe and started an analysis
00:57of it.
00:59The rate by which the peaks rise tells you about the radioactivity, and this time it
01:04was just .
01:08It was terrifying.
01:11The 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.
01:26...
01:36...
01:43Details are emerging this morning of the serious accident at a Soviet nuclear plant
01:48in the Ukraine.
01:54it's being called the worst nuclear accident in history a giant reactor has suffered what
01:59experts tonight believe to have been a core meltdown radiation of course is the big fear
02:05tonight it is the silent killer and apparently it continues to pour forth from Chernobyl
02:11it can cause immediate sickness and death there is a dramatic hike in a deadly form
02:17of thyroid cancer among children exposed to that radioactive fallout the longer you live eating
02:23and drinking in contaminated regions the more radiation builds up in your body
02:33president reagan was out of the country but then vice president george bush asked me how bad the
02:40reactor accident was and i said sir in my opinion as a nuclear engineer this is the worst possible
02:44accident i can imagine
02:54there were incredible acts of bravery and heroism sacrifice and extreme patriotism
03:09so many young people died how do we actually understand what has happened if the soviets
03:17won't tell us this was a global disaster hundreds of millions of people wanted to know am i in danger
03:25is the food safe to eat and 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
03:59in public before as 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
04:11i was 27 years old i've been working for the cia for four years
04:18i remember coming back from lunch on the monday april 28th and the soviets finally did acknowledge
04:25that there was a problem they put out a statement saying there had been an accident at the chernobyl
04:34nuclear power plant and that was a bit ominous because chernobyl was a lot further away than
04:39the ones we initially suspected
04:43both the swedish and danish embassies sent envoys to the soviet foreign ministry today
04:47asking the soviets to be more forthcoming wyatt andrews cbs news moscow
04:53the entire diplomatic community and reporting community was bombarding the the soviet authorities
05:00for 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 which was not nearly as ubiquitous
05:19as they are today so we had to go out and provide a justification to get the satellite picture
05:25we kind of sold the idea as 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
05:36said the reactor's blown up just like you said and our reaction was no we lied about that we
05:42we were we couldn't have done that that doesn't happen to reactors
05:50the images showed that the building was completely destroyed as a nuclear engineer i was astounded
05:56that the thing would have exploded in that manner and you would have this vast destruction
06:02that kind of nuclear core explosion had never happened before that emission of radiation had never
06:09happened before that was horrifying
06:25soviet propaganda had spent years insisting that the ussr's nuclear technology led the world
06:34construction began on the chernobyl power plant in 1970 by 1986 there were four reactors online
06:45one of the unique things was their extremely large physical size much larger than similar reactors in the west
06:53each of the reactors produced a thousand megawatts of electricity
06:57which was enough to provide power to around a million modern homes
07:04the plant was located to the northwest of kiev
07:09around 800 miles from foschmark in sweden where radiation from the accident was first detected in the west
07:19you have enormous plume of radioactive material is coming across europe so we knew that because of the
07:25great distances and the amount being received at those distances this must be a very large release
07:33it's hard to quantify the effect that these radioactive isotopes might have
07:38on 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 upsala i saw some children playing i
08:00wanted to stop the bus and go out and ask them don'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 and how far
08:20the contamination would spread and how dangerous that might be
08:28that is
08:29at forsmark we spoke a lot everybody in the control room the the main thought was
08:37what was it like to be in chernobyl
08:45in a power plant
08:47that had suffered such a fate.
09:17I was an engineer of the engine engine of the engine 4th block.
09:22I was 28 years old.
09:37Why did you stop for almost 40 years?
09:42I left in another life and didn't want to talk about the past.
10:12We went to work for about half an hour before the start of the change.
10:18My place was on the right.
10:20There were two turbines of turbine.
10:27When we took the change, we started preparing an experiment.
10:33Reactor number four was scheduled to be shut down for routine maintenance,
10:38and the operators were taking the opportunity
10:41to conduct a long-delayed safety test.
10:47Ironically, the experiment was intended to allow them
10:51to have better reactor safety in the event of a loss of power.
10:57They had begun this experiment a day before the accident occurred.
11:04Unfortunately, the experiment was interrupted by the grid controller,
11:07who 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,
11:41directly responsible for enacting the test,
11:44were Alexander Akimov, the head of the shift,
11:47and Leonid Toktenov controlling the reactor directly.
11:55The reactor was infamously unstable during the process of shutdown.
12:03Toktenov was not very experienced.
12:05He would be overseeing the shutdown of a nuclear reactor
12:09for the first time in his career.
12:30They were tired, and they were trying to get it done,
12:32because opportunities to do this kind of thing
12:35didn't occur very often.
12:38The most senior man in the room was Anatoly Dyatlov,
12:41who was deputy chief engineer for operations for the entire plant.
12:46There had been several disagreements about the test protocol,
12:50and the test had been delayed so long
12:53that part of the crew were threatening to leave.
12:59Dyatlov, who was never a good-tempered individual,
13:01had been awake for almost 24 hours.
13:07The last thing that Dyatlov said to Akimov before the test began was,
13:13what are you waiting for?
13:14"... the final step of the test."
13:42the AZ-5 scram button to shut the reactor down.
14:20In 1986, it was 29 years old.
14:27It turned out that we already in the evening started to patrol around the atomic station.
14:36We had an air conditioner on the atomic station.
14:41We saw two barconers, which were put in the seats.
14:48We had to take these two barconers from the water.
14:56It was about 400 meters from the reactor.
15:02We took these two people, and we heard a whistle on the back.
15:09It turned around, almost all turned around.
15:14Well, literally, the second whistle on the back.
15:22The sound, the smoke, the smoke, which is coming from the ceiling.
15:26The smoke, the light, the smoke, the smoke.
15:31The smoke, the smoke, the smoke.
15:32It turns out the air conditioning.
15:35I looked at the sky.
15:39The smoke, the smoke, the smoke.
15:42The smoke, the smoke, the smoke.
15:46It turned out very strongly.
15:51At that moment, the radiation warning lamps on the wall of the control room turned
15:56from green to red.
16:02We walked around 200 meters and stood in front of the 4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4
16:07-4-7-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4.
16:09I said, my God, who left out of the building?
16:13It took part of the building, cut it off.
16:19So, it's Pripyat?
16:27Hello?
16:28Yes.
16:293rd and 4th block?
16:304th block.
16:32Is it clear?
16:34Yes.
16:35Is it clear?
16:37Yes.
16:37No, no, no, no, no, no.
16:40We started to send messages.
16:45We brought a man to the bar and a man.
16:48It was Shashenok.
16:52Vladimir Shashenok, who was monitoring the turbines,
16:55was engulfed in radioactive steam.
16:59He was all wet and stoned.
17:03He took him.
17:06Then, he died.
17:08Then, he died.
17:10Yatlov also came and said, I don't understand what happened.
17:16There was, no doubt, complete confusion in the control room.
17:20All they knew that something was wrong, but 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 by many thick concrete walls.
17:54Reactor four had been obliterated, taking with it all of the sensors and equipment that was supposed to communicate to
18:01them what was happening inside the reactor core.
18:05So they were completely in the dark.
18:32So they were completely in the dark.
18:36The wind.
18:38What was the water?
18:41The air!
18:42The озaroined line of burning.
18:49The air!
18:51The air!
18:51The air!
18:55The coal!
18:59The air!
19:00The sea!
19:00The air!
19:02The air!
19:03The air!
19:21Those firefighters put their lives on the line, very much like the firefighters at the
19:26World Trade Center in 9-11.
19:27I mean, they knew what they were getting into, and they went and did it anyway.
19:34There was a black hole, a black hole, so it was like a circle.
19:41You go to the crew, you go to the floor of the 4th block.
19:49The building was opened up with pieces.
19:56There is a piton, there is a rocket, there is a flame.
20:07There was a little bit of trouble, that we could not be able to handle the situation.
20:11We didn't know how much radiation is 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.
20:44Tearing apart the body at the cellular level, damaging DNA as it goes.
20:49Those can cause fatal injuries, even from a very great distance, and cannot be stopped by anything
20:56short 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 ronjin an hour, enough to cause a fatal dose to anyone who stood
21:15nearby for a matter of minutes.
21:20We had no mask, no one was only fire, only fire was the fire, and everything.
21:26The smoke was wet.
21:27And everything.
21:28There was nothing.
21:33There was nothing.
21:34There are 200,000 square feet.
21:37There are all the way up here.
21:39It's all the way up here.
21:41It's all the way up here.
21:41It's all the way up here.
21:44We sent 30-40 square feet.
21:47We've got all the way up here.
21:51We saw so many pieces of smoke.
21:55I went to the roof of the building.
21:58I saw it on the roof.
22:00It's all the way up here.
22:01It's all the way up here.
22:05They were there armed with water and foam,
22:08which is what you would bring to an industrial fire.
22:12There was lightning,
22:15lightning,
22:16the eyes of the fire,
22:17broken, broken,
22:19the boys in the tubes.
22:21There's nothing to talk about and look at who.
22:24What?
22:26It was scary, can you tell me?
22:27What's that?
22:28There's a way up here.
22:29There's a way up here.
22:32There's another one.
22:34There's a way up here.
22:35There's a way up here.
22:35Where are the gloves?
22:36It's not scary.
22:38Let's go up here.
22:39Let's go up here.
22:40Let's go up here.
22:41What's that?
22:42It's scary,
22:42as if there was a fight.
22:59The fields of radiation on the roofs of the reactor buildings
23:03were so intense that almost immediately
23:05some members of the fire crews came down
23:08with symptoms of acute radiation syndrome
23:10and were taken from the scene already vomiting.
23:27People in the control room still didn't really fully understand
23:31exactly what had happened,
23:33even hours after the explosion had taken place.
23:39I came down from the outside of the scene,
23:43I came down from the outside of the scene,
23:45and he said,
23:46all the лишних are left to be left.
23:49Then,
23:50I come down to Diattov and saw it again,
23:52me again.
23:53I asked him to leave the station,
23:55all the лишних are left to be left in the block.
24:08The reactor was not receiving any cooling water that would cause a reactor meltdown so they became
24:16fixated at that point on getting water into the reactor but the gate bells on the cooling system
24:24had to be turned manually. Akimov and Toptunov left the control room and went out to try to open valves
24:34and establish new ways of cooling the reactor. And they spent a long time there in enormous fields
24:43of gamma radiation. What 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 that would
24:56have helped. Akimov and Toptunov both received lethal doses of radiation. They died a few weeks later.
25:11They gave their lives in the effort to try to do what they could.
25:36On the morning of April 26, the fire in the roof of the reactor building had been extinguished.
25:44The firefighters saved reactor building three and the rest of the complex. And I have nothing but
25:50admiration for these firefighters, many of whom died in the days and weeks to come.
26:07And when it was в 7 o'clock at the morning, there was an obviously fire. And they descended from
26:17the ceiling. We helped factionsByte the 같은nelly. move inside our
26:44Among the firefighters who went to the roof of unit three, several received lethal doses
26:49of radiation.
26:51It was horrible, horrible, and everyone was alive or alive, alive or not alive.
26:57So it's there, it's there.
27:00These firefighters, who were the first, they were all like cooking food.
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.
27:37So, 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.
27:56But something still remained on fire.
28:02The fire in the reactor core was not out, and that was a much, much hotter fire and much
28:09more difficult to deal with.
28:11All this radioactive material is coming up in the plumes of smoke, where it can be transported
28:17around the site and ultimately to other countries and other places around the world.
28:23You're talking about an unprecedented release of radiation straight up into the air.
28:31Every minute, every hour, it was still raining down huge amounts of radioactive particles.
28:41The closest town was Pripyat, three kilometers from the Chernobyl power plant itself.
28:48There were no official announcements that morning notifying anybody that an accident had taken place.
28:55People went about their business in Pripyat just as they always would on a fine spring morning.
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.
29:20In 1986, I was eight years old.
29:29Pripyat was built to serve the power plant.
29:34It was a happy city, I would say.
29:38Many children, many flowers.
29:44They planted lots of roses.
29:47I was photographed in front of them for the town brochure.
29:58I was photographed in front of them for the town brochure.
30:08We will say, as the main architecture building,
30:12to see the future city.
30:19In the general city of the city was a high school.
30:22The people of the city were mostly young.
30:23Our average of the people of the city were 27 years old.
30:28Our average of people was 27 years old.
30:28And from here, we were, well, what is young people?
30:32It means love, it means a lot of children.
30:50We woke up as normal, and as usual, we went to school.
30:57Soviet schools were open on Saturday morning,
30:59so 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.
31:37They 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,
31:50because why would we need to take pills?
31:53It's not fun.
31:55We were released earlier, but with strict rules to go home.
32:00It's spring, the weather is nice, and we were happy.
32:05Like, wow, no school anymore.
32:22At around 9 o'clock on Saturday morning,
32:26officials from the local government were summoned to a meeting,
32:29of which it was explained that everybody should go about their business as normal,
32:34and above all, no one should panic.
33:01Radiation readings were being taken by Soviet troops,
33:05who spread out around the city.
33:08Well, I said, what are the levels? What are they doing there?
33:13They said, it's okay.
33:54The Soviet authorities wanted to keep everything that happened at Chernobyl as secret as possible.
34:01They placed police roadblocks around the city of Pripyat
34:05and quite quickly the KGB cut off 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 figure out
34:18something to do.
34:23As the scale of the disaster became increasingly apparent,
34:28responsibility for dealing with the accident was escalated to Moscow.
34:36The Central Committee in Moscow was meeting nonstop.
34:42They commissioned a government commission.
34:48The Soviet Union was a senior government minister who answered directly to the head of the Communist Party of Ukraine.
35:12It was part of the first wave of senior government officials sent to the plant to find out exactly what
35:18had happened
35:19and clean up the consequences.
35:23I was at all meetings of the commission, without a exception.
35:28In Pripyat, my vice-president minister saw me.
35:34And we went to the 4th block.
35:38I was standing standing up and couldn't tell my wife.
35:43I had a feeling that someone was pounding my head and pulled up and coming from the heart.
35:47And just turned out.
35:56If you take yourself to two o'clock, it's unbelievable what the Soviet high command
36:01knew.
36:02They 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.
36:26My mother told the city authorities that there is no panic.
36:31Everything is planned on the city.
36:34They will take a wedding.
36:34They will take a wedding.
36:46They will take a wedding.
36:49I was also on the street.
36:51I was affected by her by the love of the city.
36:58That's the same evening, she proposed to her to be friends.
37:04Well, that's why the second day was planned for us.
37:11And it was the last evening in Pripyat.
37:30On the afternoon of the 26th, the members of the Government Commission arrived completely unprepared for what they found there.
38:02There was discommunication between what was going on in 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 evacuate the population in Pripyat.
38:27This is principally driven by the need for secrecy, because they didn't want word of what had happened to leak
38:33out,
38:33along with members of the population leaving the area.
38:39There was no sign of something that happened to be serious.
38:44There was nothing.
38:46There was absolutely normal life.
38:48There was absolutely normal life.
38:51I was able to get married somewhere, I saw it.
39:06As an honest incredibly difficult claims are no sort of there.
39:11We must
39:12become married, the man, the woman and the woman,
39:39The radiation situation in Pripyat grew gradually worse as the day wore on.
39:43So 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.
39:58But the scale of the accident was not apparent really to anyone.
40:16My bucket of the triads were all wet and just like burning.
40:27I put these triads in the bath so they could come back to 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.
41:08You have to see that in hindsight as impressive.
41:13The scientists who saw this said that this column lasted a few kilometers from the bus.
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 Saturday night.
42:21The Soviets expected to be able to contain the story.
42:25Even 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.
42:37Thousands 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.
42:49That 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 the helicopter pilots to drive right into blasts of radiation and try to contain the effects of
43:13this explosion.
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.
43:26This was a threat to the entire planet.
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