GHOSTS OF CHERNOBYL
In the first hours of the morning on 26 April 1986, a safety test at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station went array and triggered a massive explosion. The blast lifted the cover off of one of the power station’s nuclear reactors, Reactor 4, followed by another huge explosion that left the reactor’s core exposed and spewing radioactive material. Debris from the successive blasts rained down on the plant, as a fire spread from Reactor 4 to nearby buildings. The fire raged for days, as firefighters tried to contain the blaze. Pilots ran thousands of flights overhead, dropping sandbags onto the burning reactor in the hopes of putting out the fire.
Two days later, on the morning of 28 April, scientists at a Swedish nuclear power plant – hundreds of miles away from Chernobyl and the plant town of Pripyat, in the Ukrainian SSR – picked up unusual high readings of radioactivity. Swedish officials, after some investigating, concluded that the radioactive materials had originated in the Soviet Union. In subsequent days, similar reports of
