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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.
01:36At the right.
01:39The central room of the number 4.
01:43Details are emerging this morning of the serious accident at a Soviet nuclear plant in the Ukraine.
01:49Up a little, and hold this place.
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 of thyroid
02:18cancer among children exposed to that radioactive fallout the longer you live eating and drinking
02:24in contaminated regions the more radiation builds up in your body
02:29is it a meltdown mr president i can't come in now president reagan was out of the country
02:35but then vice president george bush asked me how bad the reactory accident was and i said sir
02:41in my opinion as a nuclear engineer this is the worst possible accident i can imagine
02:51this is the worst possible accident there were incredible acts of bravery and heroism
02:59sacrifice and extreme patriotism we lost our friends we lost our neighbors so many young people died
03:18this was a global disaster this was a global disaster hundreds of millions of people wanted
03:24to know am i in danger is 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,
03:57I've never had an opportunity to speak about this
03:59in public before.
04:02As a CIA officer, we're not generally dealing with the media.
04:07In 1986, I had been a nuclear analyst
04:10for the Central Intelligence Agency.
04:12I was 27 years old.
04:14I'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
04:25that there was a problem.
04:31It put out a statement saying there had been an accident
04:34at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant,
04:35and that was a bit ominous because Chernobyl
04:37was a lot further away than the ones we initially suspected.
04:43Both the Swedish and Danish embassies sent envoys
04:46to 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
04:57was bombarding the Soviet authorities for answers.
05:07We set out immediately to start tasking the resources
05:10that 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
05:22to get the satellite picture.
05:25We kind of sold the ideas that, well,
05:27we might see emergency response crews and that sort of thing.
05:31The next morning, our senior nuclear power analyst
05:34got an excited call from the photo interpreters
05:36and said, the reactor's blown up, just like you said.
05:39And our reaction was, no, we lied about that.
05:42We were, we couldn't have done that.
05:43That doesn't happen to reactors.
05:49The images showed that the building was completely destroyed.
05:54As a nuclear engineer, I was astounded
05:56that the thing would have exploded in that manner
05:58and that you would have this vast destruction.
06:02That kind of nuclear core explosion had never happened before.
06:07That emission of radiation had never happened before.
06:10That was horrifying.
06:25Soviet propaganda had spent years insisting
06:28that the USSR's nuclear technology led the world.
06:33Construction began on the Chernobyl power plant in 1970.
06:38By 1986, there were four reactors online.
06:45One 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
06:59to around a million modern homes.
07:04The plant was located to 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, what was it like to be in Chernobyl?
08:45In a power plant that had suffered such a fate.
09:03No one of these, it was very bad.
09:14At the time of the autodent accident, I worked with the second engineer of the turbine turbine 4-1 block.
09:21I was 28 years old.
09:37Why are you silent 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 a hour until the beginning of the break.
10:18My place was on the right side.
10:20There were two buses of the turbine.
10:27We 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
10:53in 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 didn'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?
13:39For the final step of the test, Toktenov pressed the A-Z5 scram button
13:43to shut the reactor down.
14:19В 1986 году у меня было 29 лет.
14:27Получилось, что мы уже вечером начали патрулировать вокруг атомной станции.
14:36У нас прудохладитель был возле атомной станции.
14:41Ну, видали два браконьера, которые выставляли сети.
14:48Пришлось еще раздеваться, вытаскивать этих двух браконьеров с воды.
14:55Ну, это буквально метров 400 от реактора было.
15:02Ну, мы пока этих двух человек забирали.
15:06Сзади хлопок услышали.
15:08Обернулся, почти все обернулись.
15:14Ну, буквально сразу второй хлопок.
15:22Гром, пыль, которая садится с потолка.
15:28Мигает свет.
15:31Включается аварийное освещение.
15:38Смотрю, такое облако над нами покружилось, покружилось.
15:42Ну, типа пепла какое-то.
15:46Подняло очень сильно.
15:54Подняло очень сильно.
16:14Половину обрезало его так.
16:24Значит, припять?
16:27Алло.
16:28Да.
16:28Третий и четвертый блок.
16:30Третий и четвертый блок.
16:32В результате открыло?
16:34Да.
16:35Горит крыша?
16:37Да, горит крыша.
16:38Горит крыша.
16:39Начали поступать всякие сообщения.
16:44Привели упаренного человека.
16:48Это был Шашенок.
16:52Владимир Шашенок,
16:53кто был на мунике терплин.
16:58Весь мокрый и стонал.
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, and each of the control rooms
17:47was separated from the reactor hall by many thick concrete walls.
17:54Reactor 4 had been obliterated, taking with it all of the sensors and equipment
17:59that was supposed to communicate to them what was happening inside the reactor core.
18:05So they were completely in the dark.
18:11What are you talking about?
18:13What are you talking about?
18:14There's an explosion on the line between 34 and 34 minutes.
18:19Are there people there?
18:20Yes.
18:22There's an officer, an officer, an officer, an officer, an officer, an officer, an officer.
18:41They saw a force, an officer, an officer, an officer, an officer, an officer.
18:50For these firefighters, this was something like they'd never seen before.
18:55This strange glow coming from the reactor core meltdown.
19:20Those firefighters put their lives on the line,
19:24very much like the firefighters at the World Trade Center in 9-11.
19:27I mean, they knew what they were getting into,
19:28and they went and did it anyway.
19:56There is a piton, there is a rocket,
20:00there is a flame.
20:07There was a little bit of trouble,
20:09that we could not be able to handle this situation.
20:12We didn't know how much radiation is on me.
20:25Radiation, as an intangible, odorless, potentially lethal force,
20:31is the invisible enemy.
20:34The most frightening and lethal form of radiation is gamma rays,
20:39which will pass straight through the body
20:41like a fusillade of machine gun bullets,
20:44tearing apart the body at the cellular level,
20:47damaging DNA as it goes.
20:50Those can cause fatal injuries even from a very great distance
20:53and cannot be stopped by anything short of thick sheets of lead
20:58or massive concrete blocks.
21:03In the immediate aftermath of the accident,
21:06pieces of the reactor itself were emitting fields of radiation
21:10of thousands of ronjun an hour,
21:12enough to cause a fatal dose to anyone who stood nearby
21:16for a matter of minutes.
21:20We were out of light with no shield.
21:22There was only a fireball in a moon,
21:25a fireball in a sweat.
21:27There was only rain in the fire,
21:29nothings of a suit.
21:29No hand was no helmet.
21:33There were no weapons for a vacuum as a fireball.
21:34There were only 20-ilstack squared.
21:37When we built the window,
21:38it was all a fireball.
21:39It was all a fireball.
21:41It was all four blocks.
21:44We set us up for 40 units.
22:05They were there armed with water and foam which is what you would bring to an industrial fire.
22:17They were broken, broken, broken, and they were broken.
22:21It was scary, can you tell me?
22:27What is it scary?
22:28If you look at the fight, there is another one.
22:34They say, where are the shoes?
22:37And they are not scary.
22:38Come on, put the shoes in water.
22:40What is it scary?
22:42It was scary when the fight was already.
22:59The fields of radiation on the roofs of the reactor buildings were so intense that almost immediately some members of
23:07the fire crews came down with symptoms of acute radiation syndrome 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 hours after the explosion had
23:36taken place.
23:40...
23:40...
23:40...
23:40...
23:40...
23:41...
23:41...
23:41...
23:41and the other entrance.
23:43Well, he told me to leave all the rest.
23:49Then he came to Diatl and he saw me again again.
23:53I asked him to leave all the rest.
23:59After 20 minutes, the main engineer came from the station
24:03and he needed to put water in the reactor.
24:09The reactor was not receiving any cooling water.
24:12That would cause a reactor meltdown.
24:15So they became fixated at that point
24:18on getting water into the reactor.
24:21But the gate valves on the cooling system
24:24had to be turned manually.
24:29Akimov and Toptunov left the control room
24:32and went out to try to open valves
24:34and establish new ways of cooling the reactor.
24:40And they spent a long time there
24:41in enormous fields of gamma radiation.
24:45What they didn't realize was that opening the valves
24:48was a complete waste of time.
24:52Unfortunately, the reactor was already destroyed
24:54and 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
25:13to try to do what they could.
25:18They died.
25:19I think it is that if Diatlov did not send me,
25:22then I would have solved the real fate.
25:26It would have been the ultimate fate.
25:27I could say, Diatlov did not save me.
25:36In the morning of April 26,
25:38the fire in the roof of the reactor building
25:41had 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
26:07i call it 7 годин в ранку был уже гидбей ну вот и все спустились из даху и потом расслабл
26:21он и потом
26:24понесло вы меня ажайна нога вот так вот потом как-то так меня плохо стало я упал что-то потом
26:35потом я уже очнулся уже в больнице припяти
26:43among the firefighters who went to the roof of unit 3 several received lethal doses of radiation
26:53и каждый друг за другом живи чи не живи живи чи не живи то там лежит то там лежит
27:00эти пожарники были первые то они вообще как говорили как мясо печеное было такое
27:08что-то
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 reactor building and in the
27:54grounds.
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 more
28:09difficult to deal with.
28:11All this radioactive material is coming up in the plumes of smoke, where it can be transported around the site
28:18and, 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.
29:19In 1986, I was eight years old.
29:29Pripyat was built to serve the power plant.
29:34It was a happy city, I would say.
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.
30:08But I wassigh of a while.
30:10I was projected to see the future city.
30:18In general, the residents of the city were young people.
30:23Our average age was 27 years old.
30:28And 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,
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 teachers 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? It'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.
32:05Like, wow, no school anymore.
32:22At around 9 o'clock on Saturday morning, officials from the local government were summoned to a meeting,
32:29which it was explained that everybody should go about their business as normal,
32:34and above all, no one should panic.
33:01The radiation readings were being taken by Soviet troops, who spread out around the city.
33:09They were asked to make high-ai-said for their service to the military.
33:13They thought, oh, it was a good thing.
33:19The film footage is shot in Pripyat on the 26th and 27th of April.
33:25They really struck out that it's bright white flashes.
33:27It appears to be the result of the radiation striking the film.
33:54The Soviet authorities wanted to keep everything that happened at Chernobyl
33:59as secret as possible.
34:02They placed police roadblocks around the city of Pripyat,
34:05and quite quickly the KGB cut off the telephone lines
34:09so that nobody could even phone out.
34:13Their Soviet response to any kind of problem
34:15was to try to cover it up until they could figure out something to do.
34:23As the scale of the disaster became increasingly apparent,
34:27responsibility for dealing with the 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 Party of Ukraine.
35:12It was part of the first wave of senior government officials sent to the plant
35:17to find out exactly what had happened and clean up the consequences.
35:23I was on all meetings of the committee, without any exception.
35:28In Pripyat, I met my chairman of the minister.
35:34And we went to the 4th block.
35:38I was standing there and I couldn't speak to my father.
35:43I had this feeling that someone grabbed me in my heart and hit me.
35:47It was just a hit.
35:58It was just a hit.
36:02They knew the nuclear core was emitting phenomenal amounts
36:07of radiation into the atmosphere.
36:09They knew the town of Pripyat was being bombarded with that
36:14radiation and did not tell the people of the region anything.
36:32They had a plan to go to the city, and they had a wedding.
36:46I was still in the street, I was affected by her.
36:57And that was the same morning she proposed to her to meet her.
37:04So on the second day we had planned a list.
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.
38:30Because they didn't want word of what had happened to leak out, along with members of the population leaving the
38:36area.
38:39There was no sign of something that happened to be serious.
38:44There was nothing.
38:45There was absolutely normal life.
38:48There was absolutely normal life.
38:51Someone had a wedding, I saw it.
38:53There was nothing that I was talking to her friends when I saw it.
39:06It was a good replicated.
39:11It was tough to get the sameontonness of my husband.
39:12We got married, it was hard.
39:13We became a running man and a wife.
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.
40:17The triads were all burned and just like burned.
40:27I put these triads in the bath so they could get out of the night.
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.
42:07And I understood, like, oh, something really is going on.
42:11But it just went to bed like it was a normal sort of thing, right?
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.
42:49That 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.
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