Chernobyl, 40 years on: an empty landscape and a disaster that still reverberates

Forty years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the forests and empty streets north of Kyiv tell the story of a catastrophe that still shapes the landscape and lives far beyond Ukraine. Villages stand largely deserted, kindergartens are silent, and wild animals roam where families once lived.

At 1:23am on April 26, 1986, reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, outside the town of Pripyat about 100 kilometres from Kyiv, exploded. The plant had opened in 1977, and Pripyat was purpose-built to house thousands of workers and their families. Celebrated as a feat of Soviet engineering, the site instead became synonymous with the worst nuclear disaster in history.

The Soviet leader at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev, has claimed the fallout from Chernobyl underpinned the collapse of the Soviet Union even more profoundly than his Glasnost and Perestroika reforms. Dozens of employees died when a power surge and a buildup of steam tore apart the reactor.

In the days that followed, thousands more became ill with acute radiation sickness, reporting nosebleeds, dizziness and nausea as radioactive material—including iodine-131, caesium-137, strontium-90, xenon gas and plutonium—was released into the atmosphere. Anyone inside the reactor at the time of the explosion would have received an annual safe dose of radiation in under a minute.

Plumes of radioactive smoke drifted across Europe. As many as 600,000 “liquidators,” the workers sent in to contain and clean the site, were among those exposed. The true death toll remains unknown; doctors suspect thousands of premature cancer deaths can be traced to the meltdown and the spread of radioactive isotopes.

Across Europe, people deemed at risk were offered iodine solutions to limit the uptake of radioactive iodine. More than 115,000 people were evacuated from their homes in Ukraine in the days after the blast. Many were told they would be gone only a few days; most never returned.

The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone—also known as the Zone of Alienation—covers about 2,600 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory bordering Belarus. Some estimates suggest parts of the zone will remain radioactive for millions of years. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,110 years, and uranium-235’s is about 704 million years.

For those who lived through it, the memories remain vivid. April 26, 1986, was Iryna Statsenko’s wedding day. She recalled waking to a rumble that sounded like planes overhead, with glass rattling in the windows, she told the BBC. Her fiancé, Serhiy Lobanov, sleeping on a mattress in the kitchen because guests filled the bedrooms, remembered a shake “as if some kind of wave passed” before he fell back asleep.

Four decades later, the exclusion zone endures as a stark reminder of nuclear risk, and the full impact of the disaster—on ecosystems, health and history—continues to unfold.