Lessons from Chernobyl, 40 Years Later

James Holmes

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Macabre as it may sound, some catastrophes are useful. Exhibit A: this April marked the 40th anniversary of the cataclysm at the Soviet nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, not far from Kyiv in northern Ukraine. In a supreme irony, the plant’s Reactor No. 4 detonated on April 26, 1986, while the facility staff was testing its emergency water-cooling system. To put it mildly, it failed the test. The reactor overheated; steam blew the roof off the building housing it, before a secondary explosion detonated seconds later.

The blasts claimed two lives in an instant before belching a radioactive plume high into the atmosphere. For a time, the cloud drifted toward the Soviet capital of Moscow. It irradiated downwind swathes of the Soviet republics of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Radioactive effects impinged on daily life as far away as Western Europe—including West Germany, where I was then an undergraduate at the University of Regensburg.