Today in History: Chernobyl disaster begins

For many of today's youth, Chernobyl might simply be a TV show that HBO released in order to try to maintain some of their audience after Game of Thrones fizzled out. But for those of us older than say, 35 or so, it was a very real and very terrible event that really frightened the world.

The year was 1986

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As strange as it sounds, the explosion and radiation contamination was actually started by a safety test that went horribly wrong. The test was meant to simulate fail-safes that could be activated should the reactor lose power and while conducting the test, there actually was a power loss. I'm not going to get into the specifics because it doesn't really matter and the entire project is shrouded in secrecy and most likely lies to the public, but basically the experiment was meant to have the reactor be capable of providing its own energy in the event of an emergency but it's own safety protocols and equipment interfered with this and resulted in certain core functions having no power.

Basically, as I understand it, if they had simply left the damn thing alone this wouldn't have happened. Just one more reason why I stick to the mantra of "if it isn't broken, don't fix it!"

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While the initial explosion had a very low loss of life involved with just 2 fatalities, the aftermath is what was the true disaster as residual radiation resulted in an "exclusion zone" around the facility being evacuated and this extended 30 kilometres from the actual reactor.

Over 100 first responders ended up getting hospitalized with radiation poisoning and 28 of them died. But this was just the beginning. Although the true death toll can not be accurately stated it is estimated that the loss of life in then USSR and nearby European nations to be upwards of 16,000 people.

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Chernobyl and the city adjacent called Pripyat remain abandoned to this day and the photographs that have been taken of this uninhabited-for-30-years-plus are are eerie as can be. It has become a bit of a tourist attraction - one that I would very much like to visit. It has been said that it is quite safe to visit now and most of the area other than the reactors themselves are able to be visited.

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Pripyat was meant to be a model city for the world - one that was a showcase of Soviet ingenuity and technological advancement to brag about to the rest of the world. Well that didn't exactly work out so great now did it?

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_{the maternity ward isn't spooky at all}

I was alive when this happened, and I recall hearing very little about it in America - presumably because the Cold War was still in full swing at that time and the Soviet Union was definitely not reaching out to the United States with hugely truthful information of any sort in the late 80's, least of all about a terrible failure such as this one.

Chernobyl was a disaster the likes of which the world had never seen before and hopefully will never see again. We came close during the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011, but fortunately that story has a far happier ending.... and it all happened today, 34 years ago.