I have been to the Chernobyl exclusion zone many times and brought back impressions and photographs from there. I can say that from the inside, everything looks completely different from what it looks like after reading articles or watching videos. Chernobyl is completely different. And each time is different.

On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the most terrible man-made accident in the history of the Earth, I am publishing a selection of my best photographic materials about Chernobyl. After this series of materials, you will look at Chernobyl with different eyes.

Posts are available by clicking on the title or photo.

A post-retrospective of the life of a young nuclear power plant worker in 1985. In the spring of Pripyat, even now, the very atmosphere of the city of youth, spring and hope that was there in the early eighties has been preserved.

Try to see Pripyat just like that.

In Pripyat, you can’t enter buildings now, but I managed to walk around one abandoned city house. From the material you can find out what the typical apartments of the residents of Pripyat looked like, what was left in them after the work of disinfectors and marauders, and also what the entrance looks like after almost thirty years of the power of nature.

Pripyat has become a symbol of the Chernobyl tragedy, the whole world knows about this city. But at the site of the passage of the nuclear wind, there were dozens of small towns and villages, which no one remembers now. The village of Kopachi was at the epicenter of a nuclear tragedy and was so heavily polluted that it was completely destroyed - the houses were destroyed by bulldozers and military IMRs and covered with earth.

Only the building remained on the periphery of the village kindergarten, where you can still see traces of pre-accident life and childhood in the mid-eighties.

Pripyat sixteen-story buildings are perhaps the most famous residential buildings in the city. There were exactly five such houses in Pripyat. It’s not very safe to enter the sixteen-pieces with coats of arms that are located on the main square of the city now, but it’s quite possible to visit the buildings on Geroev Stalingrad Street - I just visited one of them.

In the post - a story about the house, its apartments and views of Pripyat and the Sarcophagus from above.

How and with what did they deal with the consequences of a nuclear catastrophe? What equipment helped people in the fight against radiation pollution, how did they clean the territories adjacent to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant? Most of the "dirty" special equipment of the liquidators has long been buried in special burial grounds, but something can still be seen in a small museum near the city of Chernobyl. About this - the story in the post.

Many do not know this, but the city of Chernobyl now continues to live its very peculiar life - from an ordinary regional town, it has turned into a closed city for the life of modern workers of Chernobyl. Residential buildings have been turned into dormitories for workers who live there on a rotational basis for several months, from time to time leaving for the "mainland". The city has a curfew, almost like in wartime.

I managed to get into one of the dormitories of modern accident liquidators and see how they live. About all this story in the material about the apartments of Chernobyl.

What does Chernobyl look like now? Is it true that mutant catfish live in the cooling pond?

Truth. Read about it in a post about a walk around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant :)

The Thirty-Kilometer Exclusion Zone around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is known not only for cities and villages. There are also amazing military facilities there - for example, the famous Duga ZGRLS, also known as Chernobyl-2 - a once top-secret antenna complex designed for long-range monitoring of nuclear missile launches by a "probable enemy".

Usually, only the antennas themselves are shown at the Chernobyl-2 facility, since many of the internal premises of the complex are still classified. I managed to get into several military barracks as well as
premises where top-secret equipment was previously located.

In this post - a story about the interior of the military complex - something that will never be shown to you on any excursion.

A question that worries a lot of people - what is the level of radiation now in Chernobyl? On one of my trips to the ChEZ, I took a tuned dosimeter with me and conducted detailed measurements of radiation in different parts of the Zone, including Chernobyl, Pripyat, and the Chernobyl nuclear power plant itself. About this - a detailed photo story in the post.

The city of Slavutich became the second life of the city of Pripyat. There will never be life in Pripyat itself, but its former inhabitants had the strength to start all over again. A post about how spring always conquers winter, and life conquers death.

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April 26, 1986, during a completely planned procedure on Chernobyl nuclear power plant everything began to develop in a completely different way, as the regulations describe and as common sense suggests ...

Matvey Vologzhanin

Any event in the world consists of so many factors that we can safely say that the whole universe takes part in it in one way or another. The human ability to perceive and comprehend reality ... well, what can we say about it? It is possible that we have already almost overtaken some plants in terms of success in this area. While we are just living, you can not pay much attention to what is actually happening around you. Sounds of varying volumes are heard on the street, more or less cars seem to be moving in different directions, either a mosquito flew past the nose, or the remnants of yesterday's hallucination, and around the corner they hurriedly bring an elephant, which you did not even notice.

Workers of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. 1984

But we are calm. We know that there are Rules. The multiplication table, hygienic norms, the Military Regulations, the Criminal Code and Euclidean geometry - all that helps us to believe in the regularity, orderliness and, most importantly, the predictability of what is happening. How was it with Lewis Carroll - "If you hold a red-hot poker in your hands for a very long time, then in the end you can get slightly burned"?

Troubles begin when disasters occur. Whatever order they may be, they almost always remain inexplicable and incomprehensible. Why did the sole of this still completely new left sandal fall off, while the right one is full of strength and health? Why, out of a thousand cars that drove through a frozen puddle that day, only one flew into a ditch? Why on April 26, 1986, during a completely planned procedure at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, everything began to develop in a completely different way than usual, not in the way described by the regulations and as common sense suggests? However, let's give the floor to a direct participant in the events.

What happened?

Anatoly Dyatlov

“April 26, 1986, at one hour twenty-three minutes forty seconds, Alexander Akimov, the shift supervisor of Chernobyl Unit 4, ordered to shut down the reactor at the end of the work carried out before the shutdown of the power unit for the planned repairs. The reactor operator Leonid Toptunov removed the cap from the AZ button, which prevents accidental erroneous pressing, and pressed the button. At this signal, 187 control rods of the reactor began to move down into the core. The backlight lamps on the mnemonic panel lit up, and the arrows of the rod position indicators began to move. Alexander Akimov, standing half-turned to the reactor control panel, watched this, he also saw that the “bunnies” of the AR imbalance indicators rushed to the left, as it should be, which meant a decrease in the reactor power, turned to the safety panel, which he was observing from the ongoing experiment.

But then something happened that even the most unbridled fantasy could not predict. After a slight decrease, the reactor power suddenly began to increase at an ever-increasing rate, alarms appeared. L. Toptunov shouted about an emergency increase in power. But there was nothing he could do. He did everything he could - he held the AZ button, the CPS rods went into the active zone. There are no other resources at his disposal. Yes, and everyone else too. A. Akimov sharply shouted: "Turn off the reactor!" He jumped to the console and de-energized the electromagnetic clutches of the CPS rod drives. The action is correct, but useless. After all, the CPS logic, that is, all its elements of logical circuits, worked correctly, the rods went into the zone. Now it is clear: after pressing the AZ button, there were no correct actions, there were no means of salvation ... Two powerful explosions followed with a short interval. The AZ rods stopped moving before going half way. They had nowhere else to go. In one hour, twenty-three minutes, forty-seven seconds, the reactor was destroyed by a power boost on prompt neutrons. This is a collapse, the ultimate catastrophe that can happen in a power reactor. They didn’t comprehend it, they didn’t prepare for it.”

This is an excerpt from Anatoly Dyatlov's book Chernobyl. How it was". The author is the deputy chief engineer of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant for operation, who was present that day at the fourth unit, who became one of the liquidators, recognized as one of the perpetrators of the tragedy and sentenced to ten years in prison, from where he was released two years later to die from radiation, where he and managed to write his memoirs before he died in 1995.

If someone taught physics very badly at school and vaguely imagines what is happening inside the reactor, he probably did not understand what was described above. In principle, this can be conditionally explained in this way.

Imagine that we have tea in a glass, which is trying to boil non-stop on its own. Well, here's the tea. So that he does not smash the glass to smithereens and fill the kitchen with hot steam, we regularly lower metal spoons into the glass - in order to cool it down. The colder we need tea, the more spoons we shove. And vice versa: to make the tea hotter, we pull out the spoons. Of course, the carbide-boron and graphite rods that are placed in the reactor work according to a slightly different principle, but the essence of this does not change much.

Now let's remember what the main problem stands in front of all the power plants in the world. Most of all, power engineers have no trouble with fuel prices, not with drinking electricians, and not with crowds of “greens” picketing their checkpoints. The biggest trouble in the life of any power engineer is the uneven power consumption by the station's customers. The unpleasant habit of mankind to work during the day, sleep at night, and even wash in chorus, shave and watch TV shows leads to the fact that the energy produced and consumed, instead of flowing in a smooth uniform stream, is forced to jump like a mad goat, which causes blackouts and other troubles. After all, instability in the operation of any system leads to failures, and getting rid of excess energy is harder than producing it. Especially great difficulties with this are precisely at nuclear power plants, since chain reaction it is rather difficult to explain when it should go more actively, and when it is possible to slow down.

Engineers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. 1980

In the early 1980s, the USSR began to slowly explore the possibility of rapidly increasing and decreasing the power of reactors. This method of controlling energy loads was, in theory, much simpler and more profitable than all the others.

This program, of course, was not discussed openly, the station personnel could only guess why these “scheduled repairs” became so frequent and the regulations for working with reactors changed. But, on the other hand, they didn’t do anything so extraordinarily vile with the reactors. And if this world was regulated only by the laws of physics and logic, then the fourth power unit would still behave like an angel and regularly serve the peaceful atom.

For so far, no one has been able to properly answer the main question of the Chernobyl disaster: why did the reactor power not fall after the introduction of the rods at that time, but, on the contrary, inexplicably increased sharply?

The two most authoritative bodies - the USSR Gosatomnadzor Commission and the IAEA Special Committee, after several years of work, gave birth to documents, each of which is crammed with facts about how the accident proceeded, but one cannot find an answer to the question “why?” on a single page in these detailed studies. There you can find wishes, regrets, fears, indications of shortcomings and forecasts for the future, but there is no clear explanation for what happened. By and large, both of these reports could be reduced to the phrase "Someone boomed there"*.

* Note Phacochoerus "a Funtika: « No, well, that's slander! The IAEA staff, however, expressed themselves more cultured. In fact, they wrote: “It is not known for certain how the power surge began, which led to the destruction of the reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. »

Less official researchers, on the contrary, put forward their versions with might and main - one more beautiful and more convincing than the other. And if there were not so many of them, one of them would probably be worth believing.

Various institutions, organizations and simply world-famous scientists in turn declared the perpetrators of the incident:

incorrect design of the rods; incorrect design of the reactor itself;
the error of personnel who reduced the power of the reactor for too long; a local unnoticed earthquake that occurred exactly under the Chernobyl nuclear power plant; ball lightning; more unknown to science a particle that sometimes occurs in a chain reaction.

The alphabet is not enough to list all the authoritative versions (non-authoritative ones, of course, as always, look more beautiful and contain such wonderful things as evil Martians, cunning cereushniks and an angry Jehovah. It is a pity that such a respected scientific publication as MAXIM cannot go on about the low tastes of the crowd and with gusto to describe all this in more detail.

These strange methods of dealing with radiation

The list of items that are usually required to be distributed to the public in the event of a radiation hazard seems incomplete to the uninitiated. And where is the button accordion, boa and net? But in fact, the things on this list are not so useless.

Mask Someone seriously believes that gamma rays, instantly penetrating steel, will save in front of five layers of gauze? Gamma rays are not. But radioactive dust, on which the heaviest, but no less dangerous substances have already settled, will enter the respiratory tract less intensively.

Iodine The isotope of iodine - one of the shortest living elements of a radioactive release - has the unpleasant property of settling in the thyroid gland for a long time and making it completely unusable. Tablets with iodine are recommended to be taken so that your thyroid gland of this iodine is filled up and it no longer grabs it from the air. True, an overdose of iodine is a dangerous thing in itself, so it is not recommended to swallow it in vials.

canned food Milk and vegetables would be the most useful foods when exposed to radiation, but, alas, they are the first to become infected. And then comes the meat, which ate vegetables and gave milk. So it is better not to collect pasture in the infected region. Especially mushrooms: in them the concentration of radioactive chemical elements is highest.

liquidation

Recording of rescue dispatchers' conversations immediately after the disaster:

The explosion itself claimed the lives of two people: one died immediately, the second was taken to the hospital. Firefighters were the first to arrive at the scene of the disaster and set to work - extinguishing the fire. They extinguished it in canvas overalls and helmets. They had no other means of protection, and they did not know about the radiation threat - only after a couple of hours information began to spread that this fire was somehow different from the usual one.

By morning, firefighters put out the flames and began to faint - radiation damage began to affect. 136 employees and rescuers who found themselves at the station that day received a huge dose of radiation, and one in four died in the first months after the accident.

In the next three years, a total of about half a million people were engaged in the liquidation of the consequences of the explosion (almost half of them were conscripts, many of whom were sent to Chernobyl, in fact, by force). The very site of the disaster was covered with a mixture of lead, boron and dolomites, after which a concrete sarcophagus was erected over the reactor. Nevertheless, the amount of radioactive substances released into the air immediately after the accident and in the first weeks after it was enormous. Neither before nor after have such numbers been found in densely populated areas.

The deafening silence of the Soviet authorities about the accident did not then seem as strange as it is now. Hiding bad or exciting news from the population was so common practice at that time that even information about a sex maniac operating in the area could not reach the ears of a serene public for years; and only when the next "Fischer" or "Mosgaz" began to count their victims by tens, or even hundreds, the district police officers were given the task to quietly bring to the attention of parents and teachers the fact that it would probably be better for the kids not to run alone along the street.

Therefore, the city of Pripyat was evacuated the next day after the accident hastily, but quietly. People were told that they were being taken out for a day, a maximum of two, and they were asked not to take any things with them so as not to overload the transport. The authorities did not say a word about radiation.

Rumors, of course, spread, but the vast majority of the inhabitants of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia have never heard of any Chernobyl. Some of the members of the Central Committee of the CPSU had the conscience to raise the issue of canceling the May Day demonstrations, at least in cities located directly in the path of polluted clouds, but it was considered that such a violation of the eternal order would cause unhealthy unrest in society. So the residents of Kyiv, Minsk and other cities managed to run around with balloons and carnations under the radioactive rain.

But a radioactive release of this magnitude was impossible to hide. The Poles and Scandinavians were the first to raise the cry, to which those same magical clouds flew in from the east and brought with them a lot of interesting things.

Indirect evidence confirming that scientists gave the government the green light to keep silent about Chernobyl can be the fact that scientist Valery Legasov, a member of the government commission investigating the accident, organized the liquidation for four months and voiced the official (very smoothed) version of what was happening to the foreign press, in 1988 hanged himself, leaving in his office a dictaphone record telling about the details of the accident, and that part of the record, which chronologically should have been a story about the reaction of the authorities to the events in the first days, was erased by unidentified persons.

Another indirect evidence of this is that scientists still radiate optimism. And now the officials of the Federal Agency for Atomic Energy stand on the fact that only those several hundred people who took part in the liquidation in the first days of the explosion, and even then with banknotes, can be considered really victims of the explosion. For example, the article “Who Helped Create the Chernobyl Myth”, written by experts from the FAAE and IBRAE RAS in 2005, analyzes statistics on the health status of residents of contaminated areas and, recognizing that, in general, the population there gets sick a little more often, sees the reason only in the fact that, succumbing to alarmist moods, people, firstly, run to the doctors with every pimple, and secondly, for many years they have been living in unhealthy stress caused by hysteria in the yellow press. They explain the huge number of disabled people among the liquidators of the first wave by the fact that “being disabled is beneficial”, and hint that the main cause of catastrophic mortality among the liquidators is not the consequences of exposure, but alcoholism, caused by the same irrational fear of radiation. Even the phrase "radiation danger" is written by our peaceful nuclear scientists exclusively in quotation marks.

But this is one side of the coin. For every nuclear worker who is convinced that there is no cleaner and safer energy in the world than atomic energy, there is a member of an environmental or human rights organization who is ready to sow that same panic in generous handfuls.

Greenpeace, for example, estimates the number of victims of the Chernobyl accident at 10 million, adding to them, however, representatives of the next generations who will fall ill or be born sick within the next 50 years.

Between these two poles there are dozens and hundreds of international organizations, statistical studies which contradict each other so much that in 2003 the IAEA was forced to create the Chernobyl Forum organization, whose task would be to analyze these statistics in order to create at least some reliable picture of what is happening.

And so far, there is nothing clear with estimates of the consequences of the disaster. The increase in mortality of the population from areas close to Chernobyl can be explained by the mass migration of young people from there. A slight "rejuvenation" of oncological diseases - by checking local residents for oncology much more intensively than in other places, so many cases of cancer are caught at very early stages. Even the condition of burdocks and ladybugs in the closed zone around Chernobyl is the subject of fierce disputes. It seems like the burdocks grow amazingly juicy, and the cows are well-fed, and the number of mutations in the local flora and fauna is within the natural norm. But what is the harmlessness of radiation here, and what is the beneficial effect of the absence of people for many kilometers around, it is difficult to answer.

Myths and facts

On April 26, 1986, there was an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Experts from all over the world are still eliminating the consequences of the largest catastrophe in the history of the peaceful atom.

A modernization program was carried out in the Russian nuclear industry, obsolete technological solutions were almost completely revised and systems were developed that, according to experts, completely exclude the possibility of such an accident.

We talk about the myths that surround the Chernobyl accident and the lessons learned from it.

DATA

The biggest disaster in the history of peaceful atom

The construction of the first stage of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant began in 1970, the city of Pripyat was built nearby for the maintenance personnel. On September 27, 1977, the first power unit of the station with an RBMK-1000 reactor with a capacity of 1 thousand MW was connected to the power grid Soviet Union. Later, three more power units were put into operation, the annual power generation of the station amounted to 29 billion kilowatt-hours.

On September 9, 1982, the first accident occurred at the Chernobyl NPP - during a test run of the 1st power unit, one of the reactor's technological channels collapsed, and the graphite laying of the core was deformed. There were no casualties, the liquidation of the consequences of the emergency took about three months.

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It was planned to shut down the reactor (at the same time, the emergency cooling system was turned off as planned) and measure the generator performance.

It was not possible to safely shut down the reactor. At 01:23 Moscow time, an explosion and fire occurred at the power unit.

State of emergency has become biggest disaster in the history of nuclear energy: the reactor core was completely destroyed, the building of the power unit partially collapsed, and there was a significant release of radioactive materials into the environment.

Directly during the explosion, one person died - pump operator Valery Khodemchuk (his body could not be found under the rubble), in the morning of the same day in the medical unit, Vladimir Shashenok, an engineer adjusting the automation system, died from burns and a spinal injury.

On April 27, the city of Pripyat (47 thousand 500 people) was evacuated, and in the following days, the population of the 10-kilometer zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Total during May 1986 out of 188 settlements about 116 thousand people were resettled in the 30-kilometer exclusion zone around the station.

The intense fire lasted 10 days, during which time the total release of radioactive materials into the environment amounted to about 14 exabecquerels (about 380 million curies).

More than 200 thousand square meters were exposed to radioactive contamination. km, of which 70% - on the territory of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

The most polluted were the northern regions of the Kyiv and Zhytomyr regions. Ukrainian SSR, Gomel region Byelorussian SSR and Bryansk region. RSFSR.

Radioactive fallout fell in the Leningrad region, Mordovia and Chuvashia.

Subsequently, pollution has been noted in Norway, Finland and Sweden.

The first brief official message about the emergency was transmitted to TASS on April 28. According to the former general secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Mikhail Gorbachev, said in an interview with the BBC in 2006, the May Day holiday demonstrations in Kyiv and other cities were not canceled due to the fact that the country's leadership did not have a "full picture of what had happened" and feared panic among the population. Only on May 14, Mikhail Gorbachev made a televised address in which he spoke about the true scale of the incident.

The Soviet State Commission to Investigate the Causes of the Emergency placed responsibility for the catastrophe on the management and operational personnel of the station. The Nuclear Safety Advisory Committee (INSAG) set up by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in its 1986 report confirmed the conclusions of the Soviet commission.

Tassovtsy in Chernobyl

One of the first journalists to the scene of the accident in the Ukrainian Polissya, to tell the truth about a man-made disaster unprecedented in history, was Vladimir Itkin from Tassov. As a real hero-reporter, he showed himself during the disaster. His materials were published in almost all newspapers of the country.

And just a few days after the explosion, the world was shocked by photographs of the smoking ruins of the fourth power unit, which were taken by TASS photojournalist Valery Zufarov and his Ukrainian colleague Vladimir Repik. Then, in the early days, flying around the power plant in a helicopter together with scientists and specialists, fixing all the details of the atomic release, they did not think about the consequences for their health. The helicopter from which the reporters filmed hovered just 25 meters above the poisonous abyss.

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Valery already knew that he had "grabbed" a huge dose, but continued to fulfill his professional duty, creating a photographic chronicle of this tragedy for posterity.

Reporters worked at the mouth of the reactor, during the construction of the sarcophagus.

Valery paid for these pictures with an untimely death in 1996. Zufarov has many awards - including the "Golden Eye" awarded by World Press Photo.

Among the Tassov journalists who have the status of a liquidator of the consequences of the Chernobyl accident is Valery Demidetsky, a correspondent in Chisinau. In the fall of 1986, he was sent to Chernobyl as a person who had already dealt with the atom - Valery served on a nuclear submarine and knew what the radiation hazard was.

"Most of all," he recalls, "people were amazed there. Real heroes. They understood well what they were doing, working day and night. Pripyat struck. The handsome city where the nuclear power plant workers lived resembled the Tarkovsky Stalker zone. houses, scattered children's toys, thousands of cars abandoned by residents.

- According to TASS

Hiking in hell

One of the first who took part in the liquidation of the accident were firefighters. The signal about a fire at the nuclear power plant was received on April 26, 1986 at 01:28. By morning, 240 people were in the accident zone. personnel Kyiv Regional Fire Department.

The government commission turned to the chemical defense troops to assess the radiation situation and to military helicopter pilots to assist in extinguishing the core fire. At that time, several thousand people worked at the emergency site.

Representatives of the radiation control service, the Civil Defense Forces, the Chemical Troops of the Ministry of Defense, the State Hydrometeorological Service and the Ministry of Health worked in the accident zone.

In addition to liquidating the accident, their task included measuring the radiation situation at the nuclear power plant and studying the radioactive contamination of natural environments, evacuating the population, and protecting the exclusion zone that was established after the disaster.

Doctors monitored the irradiated and carried out the necessary therapeutic and preventive measures.

In particular, at different stages of liquidation of the consequences of the accident, the following were involved:

From 16 to 30 thousand people from different departments for decontamination work;

More than 210 military units and subdivisions with a total number of 340 thousand military personnel, of which more than 90 thousand military personnel during the most acute period from April to December 1986;

18.5 thousand employees of internal affairs bodies;

Over 7 thousand radiological laboratories and sanitary and epidemiological stations;

In total, about 600 thousand liquidators from all over the former USSR took part in fire fighting and clearing.

Immediately after the accident, the work of the station was stopped. The mine of the exploded reactor with burning graphite was covered from helicopters with a mixture of boron carbide, lead and dolomite, and after the completion of the active stage of the accident - with latex, rubber and other dust-absorbing solutions (in total, by the end of June, about 11 thousand 400 tons of dry and liquid materials were dumped).

After the first, most acute, stage, all efforts to localize the accident were focused on the creation of a special protective structure called a sarcophagus ("Shelter" object).

At the end of May 1986, a special organization was formed, consisting of several construction and installation departments, concrete plants, departments of mechanization, motor transport, power supply, etc. The work was carried out around the clock, in shifts, the number of which reached 10 thousand people.

In the period from July to November 1986, a concrete sarcophagus with a height of more than 50 m and external dimensions of 200 by 200 m was built, covering the 4th power unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, after which emissions radioactive elements stopped. During the construction, an accident occurred: on October 2, the Mi-8 helicopter caught on a crane cable with its blades and fell on the territory of the station, killing four crew members.

Inside the "Shelter" there is at least 95% of the irradiated nuclear fuel from the destroyed reactor, including about 180 tons of uranium-235, as well as about 70 thousand tons of radioactive metal, concrete, glassy mass, several tens of tons of radioactive dust with a total with an activity of more than 2 million curies.

Shelter under threat

The world's largest international structures - from energy concerns to financial corporations - continue to assist Ukraine in solving the problems of the final cleanup of the Chernobyl zone.

The main disadvantage of the sarcophagus is its leakage (the total area of ​​the cracks reaches 1 thousand square meters).

The guaranteed service life of the old "Shelter" was calculated until 2006, so in 1997 the G7 countries agreed on the need to build "Shelter-2", which would cover the outdated structure.

Currently, a large protective structure "New Safe Confinement" is being built - an arch that will be pushed over the "Shelter". In April 2019, it was reported that it was 99% ready and had undergone a trial three-day operation.

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Work on the construction of the second sarcophagus was supposed to be completed in 2015, but was postponed more than once. main reason the delay is referred to as a "serious cash shortage".

The total cost of completing the project, integral part which is the construction of the sarcophagus, is 2.15 billion euros. At the same time, the cost of building the sarcophagus itself is 1.5 billion euros.

675 million euros provided by the EBRD. If necessary, the bank is ready to finance the budget deficit for this project.

Up to 10 million euros (5 million euros annually) - an additional contribution to the Chernobyl fund - decided to be made in 2016-2017 by the Russian government.

180 million euros were pledged by other international donors.

$40 million intended to provide the United States.

Some Arab countries and the People's Republic of China have also expressed their desire to make donations to the Chernobyl Fund.

Myths about the accident

There is a huge gap between scientific knowledge about the consequences of the accident and public opinion. The latter, in the vast majority of cases, is influenced by the developed Chernobyl mythology, which has little to do with the real consequences of the disaster, the Institute for the Problems of the Safe Development of Nuclear Energy notes. Russian Academy Sciences (IBRAE RAN).

Inadequate perception of radiation hazard, according to experts, has objective specific historical reasons, including:

Silence by the state of the causes and real consequences of the accident;

Ignorance by the population of the elementary foundations of the physics of processes occurring both in the field of nuclear energy and in the field of radiation and radioactive impact;

The hysteria in the media provoked by the mentioned reasons;

Numerous problems of a social nature of a federal scale, which have become good ground for the rapid formation of myths, etc.

Indirect damage from the accident, associated with socio-psychological and socio-economic consequences, is much higher than the direct damage from the action of Chernobyl radiation.

Myth 1.

The accident had a catastrophic effect on the health of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people

According to the Russian National Radiation and Epidemiological Registry (NRER), radiation sickness was detected in 134 people who were on the emergency block on the first day. Of these, 28 died within a few months after the accident (27 in Russia), 20 died of various causes within 20 years.

Over the past 30 years, NRER recorded 122 cases of leukemia among the liquidators. 37 of them could be induced by Chernobyl radiation. There was no increase in the number of diseases with other types of oncology among the liquidators compared to other groups of the population.

Between 1986 and 2011, out of 195,000 Russian liquidators registered with the NRER, about 40,000 people died from various causes, while the overall mortality rates did not exceed the corresponding average values ​​for the population of the Russian Federation.

According to the NRER data at the end of 2015, out of 993 cases of thyroid cancer in children and adolescents (at the time of the accident), 99 could be related to radiation exposure.

No other consequences for the population were recorded, which completely refutes all the prevailing myths and stereotypes about the scale of the radiological consequences of the accident for public health, experts say. These same conclusions were confirmed 30 years after the disaster.

Curie, becquerel, sievert - what's the difference

Radioactivity is the ability of some natural elements and artificial radioactive isotopes spontaneously decay, while emitting radiation invisible and imperceptible by a person.

Two units are used to measure the amount of a radioactive substance or its activity: the off-system unit curie and unit becquerel adopted in international system units (SI).

The environment and living organisms are affected by the ionizing effect of radiation, which is characterized by the dose of radiation or exposure.

The higher the radiation dose, the greater the degree of ionization. The same dose may accumulate over different time, and the biological effect of irradiation depends not only on the magnitude of the dose, but also on the time of its accumulation. The faster the dose is received, the greater its damaging effect.

Different types of radiation create a different damaging effect at the same dose of radiation. All national and international standards are set in equivalent radiation dose. The off-system unit of this dose is rem, and in the SI system - sievert(Sv).

Rafael Arutyunyan, First Deputy Director of the Institute for the Safe Development of Nuclear Energy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, clarifies that if we analyze the additional doses accumulated by the inhabitants of the Chernobyl zones over the years since the accident, out of the 2.8 million Russians who found themselves in the area of ​​impact:

2.6 million received less than 10 millisieverts. This is five to seven times less than the average global exposure dose from natural background radiation;

Fewer than 2,000 people received additional doses greater than 120 millisieverts. This is one and a half to two times less than the radiation doses of residents of countries such as Finland.

It is for this reason, the scientist believes, that no radiological consequences are observed and cannot be observed among the population, except for the thyroid cancer already noted above.

According to experts from Science Center of Radiation Medicine of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine, out of 2.34 million people living in the contaminated territories of Ukraine, in the 12 years after the disaster, about 94,800 people died from cancers of various origins, about 750 people additionally died due to "Chernobyl" cancers.

For comparison: among 2.8 million people, regardless of their place of residence, every year from cancers not related to the radiation factor, the mortality rate is from 4 to 6 thousand, that is, in 30 years - from 90 to 170 thousand deaths.

What doses of radiation are lethal

ubiquitous natural radiation background, as well as some medical procedures, result in each person receiving on average an equivalent radiation dose of 2 to 5 millisieverts annually.

For people professionally involved in radioactive materials, the annual equivalent dose should not exceed 20 millisieverts.

A lethal dose is considered to be 8 sieverts, and the half-survival dose at which half of the exposed group of people dies is 4-5 sieverts.

At the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, about a thousand people who were near the reactor at the time of the disaster received doses of 2 to 20 sieverts, which in some cases turned out to be fatal.

In liquidators, the average dose was about 120 millisieverts.

© YouTube.com/TASS

Myth 2.

The genetic consequences of the Chernobyl accident for humanity are terrible

According to Harutyunyan, world science over 60 years of detailed scientific research did not observe any genetic defects in human offspring due to radiation exposure of their parents.

This conclusion is confirmed by the results of constant monitoring of both the victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the next generation.

No excess of genetic deviations relative to the average data for the country was recorded.

20 years after Chernobyl, the International Commission on Radiological Protection, in its 2007 recommendations, lowered the value of hypothetical risks by almost 10 times.

At the same time, there are other opinions. According to the research of Doctor of Agricultural Sciences Valery Glazko:

After the catastrophe, not everyone who should have been born is born.

Less specialized, but with a higher resistance to action, are predominantly reproduced. adverse factors form environments.

The response to the same doses of ionizing radiation depends on its novelty for the population.

The scientist believes that the real consequences of the Chernobyl accident for human populations will be available for analysis by 2026, since the generation that was directly affected by the accident is only now starting to start families and give birth to children.

Myth 3.

Nature suffered from the accident at a nuclear power plant even more than man

An unprecedentedly large release of radionuclides into the atmosphere occurred in Chernobyl, on this basis, the Chernobyl accident is considered the most severe man-made accident in human history. To date, almost everywhere, with the exception of the most contaminated areas, the dose rate has returned to the background level.

The consequences of irradiation for flora and fauna were noticeable only directly next to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant within the exclusion zone.

The paradigm of radioecology is such that if a person is protected, then the environment is protected with a huge margin, Professor Harutyunyan notes. If the impact on human health of a radiation incident is minimal, then its impact on nature will be even less. The threshold for the manifestation of negative impacts on flora and fauna is 100 times higher than for humans.

The impact on nature after the accident was observed only near the destroyed power unit, where the dose of irradiation of trees for 2 weeks reached 2000 roentgens (in the so-called "red forest"). On the this moment all natural environment even in this place, it has fully recovered and even flourished due to a sharp decrease in anthropogenic impact.

Myth 4.

The resettlement of people from the city of Pripyat and the surrounding areas was poorly organized

The evacuation of the inhabitants of the city of 50,000 was carried out quickly, Harutyunyan claims. Despite the fact that, according to the regulations then in force, evacuation was mandatory only in the event that a dose of 750 mSv was reached, the decision on it was made at a predicted dose level of less than 250 mSv. Which is quite consistent with today's understanding of the criteria for emergency evacuation. The information that people received large doses of radiation exposure during the evacuation is not true, the scientist is sure.

Much has been told about the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, there are many legends and rumors about this place, so I decided to pack my things and go to the exclusion zone to see this legend with my own eyes. The main difficulty for me was to cross the border with Ukraine. Relations between our countries are quite tense, so I had to penetrate the territory of a neighboring state with the help of a small amount of bribes.

Arriving in Kyiv, I left my things at the hotel, and took everything I needed with me and went directly to the “exclusion zone” itself.

I needed to get there, it was to the village of Peski, and from there I had to get to Chernobyl itself. Upon arrival at the place, they concluded an agreement with me that I would not make any claims in case of deterioration of my health, it is understandable, the radioactive background in some places is quite high, and if I get involved somewhere it will only be my problems.

Tour guides I found myself quite easily, to go alone through the albeit bad, but the protected area is quite dangerous. In total, I paid my guides $ 200 and we were taken on an excursion.

The route for all tourists is the same for everyone, the most non-radioactive paths are chosen, along which you can walk without problems without putting on special protection.

The first thing that catches your eye is, of course, the mysterious echo of the USSR throughout the territory. Abandoned houses, playgrounds, cemeteries. Almost original nature, where in the forest you can meet quite ordinary animals, unlike urban living creatures, no one touches these, and therefore they can multiply and expand their habitat without problems.

The first object that we met was Elias Church. Quite a well-preserved building, unlike the rest, the building has not changed much. In the 30s, they tried to demolish it, but the locals were able to defend the church and now it is considered one of the symbols of the dead city.

Before the accident, the number of inhabitants was at the level of 12-13 thousand people, but now only shift workers and people who settled here independently live there. Each building, each monument reminds of the consequences of the disaster. In honor of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, which eliminated the consequences of the accident, a monument was erected, unfortunately, almost all members of the team died from a dose of radiation.

As I said, the entire territory of the zone, 30 km away, is guarded by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, there are not enough employees, so not everyone succeeds in catching everyone.

A river flows in Pripyat, some "special" citizens even tried to swim in it, but the guide stops them in time, everything here is saturated with radiation. Chernobyl nuclear power plant released about 50 tons into the air harmful substances, they polluted the environment more than Hiroshima with its atomic explosion.

In the same place, at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, one can see the very fourth block, which is covered with an already rotten sarcophagus. Now a new one will be built on top of the old one, but then it didn’t exist yet and one could see from afar a pipe with the building of the third power unit, which is often captured in photographs.

Walking along the trails, I really want to move away from them and see the city from a different angle, but, alas, you can enter into a radioactive spot. In Pripyat itself, after the accident, the city was so polluted that the houses had to be demolished and, digging under each individual pit, level the building with the ground.

We were allowed into some high-rise buildings that could not be demolished due to their size, and there we were able to find the remains ordinary life Soviet people: certificates of honor, children's toys and other utensils that almost every inhabitant of the USSR had.

To date, there are many books and literature about Chernobyl, Pripyat and the Chernobyl accident. Writers did not stand aside, creating fiction novels, popular science works, about the largest man-made disaster in the history of mankind. Here is some of them

V. Akatov "Point of no return"

Liquidator's Notes. This is essentially the notes of a person who went through one of the greatest tragedies in the history of mankind - Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Just one year in the life of Petr Rusenko and at the same time his whole life, intertwined with the fate of the country and people. All the events described in the novel really took place, the characters are real people, the author of the notes changed only nine names. The reader will find in the "Notes" many previously unpublished information related to the Chernobyl tragedy, other accidents and nuclear disasters, known historical events, get acquainted with the original versions of the causes of their occurrence, including the collapse of the Soviet state.

Aleksievich S. "Chernobyl prayer: a chronicle of the future"

In the book of Svetlana Aleksievich, we see the stories of real people, written with the blood of the heart, diluted with a burning tear of memories.stories of people who went through all the horror of the disaster: evacuation, illness, loss of loved ones ... Every resident of Chernobyl was attached to that event, and the book reflects not fictional stories, but real events in the lives of real people.

Voznesenskaya Y. "Star of Chernobyl"

“And a great star fell from heaven, burning like a lamp, and fell on a third of the rivers and on the fountains of waters. The name of this star is "wormwood"..." - says the Apocalypse. 30 years ago, many remembered that the inconspicuous fragrant grass of our fields - wormwood - has another name: Chernobyl... fear, death and gives hope for the future. Written in the best traditions of realistic Russian literature, the novel includes documentary material, taken by the author from Soviet newspapers, radio and television broadcasts, is therefore valuable not only as piece of art but also as historical evidence.

Gigevich V, Chernov O. “The waters have become bitter. Chronicle of the Chernobyl disaster»

In this chronicle book, the authors return to the tragic events of April 1986 in order to rethink its consequences in various aspects - economic, psychological, technical, medical, social. The book summarizes the material collected by the authors from the beginning of the disaster to April 1990.The book tells how the state kept people in the dark in the first days and months after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It tells about what ordinary people had to go through, it is said about how sometimes people spread ridiculous rumors simply because the truth was hidden from them. Also in the book there is information that speaks about the sources of radiation, the effect of radiation on the human body and about nuclear power generally.

Gubarev V. "Passion for Chernobyl"

Writer and journalist Vladimir Gubarev was a witness and participant in the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The book contains official documents, interviews with direct participants in the aftermath of the accident and their memories of life after the tragedy. According to the author, “this day in the history of our civilization was a turning point. He not only changed the destinies of many people, but also forced History to follow a new path. On April 26, 1986, a giant radioactive cloud covered not only our country, Europe, Asia and America, but also the past, present and future of mankind. Passion for Chernobyl has been going on for a quarter of a century. They do not leave everyone who is related to what happened.”

A.S. Dyatlov. "Chernobyl. How it was"

Kazko V. (Kozko V.) "Save and have mercy on us, black stork": Novel.

In a village forgotten by everyone, stained with the glow of Chernobyl, people continue to work, joke, live without fear, hope. Yanka Kaganets also hopes - a conscientious person who loves his land. He knows that both for him and for his beloved Mary, peace of mind will come. When the question arose about the destruction of the grove thinned from numerous clearings, where the black stork listed in the Red Book lives, people seemed to wake up ...

Kupny A. “Chernobyl. Alive as long as we are remembered"

This is a book of memories. People who went through Chernobyl themselves will tell about their work, which we consider heroic. 12 stories about the elimination of the consequences of the accident, about life and work in extreme conditions. At different times and to varying degrees, they came into contact with the Chernobyl disaster and with the Shelter object. These are leaders, scientists, the first researchers of the destroyed block - "stalkers".

Levanovich L. "Wind with the bitterness of wormwood » ( « Wormwood Wind", "Liquidator's Wife")

Based on a documentary basis, the stories tell about how the accident affected the fate of ordinary people.

Medvedev G. "Nuclear tan"

The book of the writer Grigory Medvedev includes three stories: "Nuclear tan", "Power unit" and "Chernobyl notebook".Documentary investigative stories that have become a fearlessly truthful confession. The author truthfully tells about the events of the first hours and days of the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Writer and publicist, nuclear specialist, who at one time worked at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, personally acquainted with all the main participants in the events. Immediately after the accident, he was sent to Chernobyl and had the opportunity to learn a lot and see with his own eyes on fresh tracks. He gives many technical details, reveals the secrets of bureaucratic relations, talks about scientific and design miscalculations, about pernicious pressure from the authorities, about violations of publicity that brought great harm. The author shows the behavior and role of numerous participants in the drama, living, real people, with their shortcomings and virtues, doubts and weaknesses, delusions and heroism. Here is what the author writes about his work: The pain, the pangs of conscience that I experienced when I learned about the Chernobyl explosion were special. After all, for 10 years before Chernobyl, I wrote novels and stories on the atomic theme, trying to warn people. Now I had to write about Chernobyl most truthfully, relying on my experience as a nuclear power engineer and writer". After reading this book, you will get an idea of ​​the true extent of the tragedy, as well as the situation that has developed in nuclear safety over the years.

Mirny S. “Living force. Diary of a liquidator"

Author- Writer and screenwriter, scientist and expert on environmental disasters. A real participant in the liquidation of the Chernobyl disaster: in 1986, the author was the commander of a radiation reconnaissance platoon. This is a book about the liquidation of the man-made disaster in Chernobyl and the people who were directly involved in it. Despite the drama of the situation, which is described in the book, it is written in an easy and accessible language. The heroes of the novel emerge from difficult trials with dignity and new knowledge - balanced and unexpectedly optimistic.

Mirny S. “Liquidators. Chernobyl comedy"

Peaceful morning on April 27, 1986. Residents of the town of Pripyat are preparing for the May Day holidays, but at this time columns of buses are drawn into the city. The general evacuation of the Chernobyl Zone begins ... He is yesterday's graduate of the Faculty of Chemistry, and now he is a radiation intelligence officer. She is a local resident, the first beauty, forced to cut her luxurious hair bald. But the love that broke out between them turned out to be stronger than the explosion at the fourth power unit ... The Chernobyl tragedy turned into a comedy - a funny and dramatic story about a real Zone where everyone can become a stalker! Even against your will...

Odinets M. "Chernobyl: days of testing"

Poems, essays, stories, excerpts from novels and stories, interviews. Collected together, these documentaries and works of art form the content of the collection “Chernobyl. Days of testing.The book is based on essays and reports by a Pravda correspondent from the scene of events - the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. They tell about the courage and heroism of those who took upon themselves the heat of the flame and the deadly breath of the reactor. At the same time, special attention is paid to firefighters, employees of internal affairs bodies and other law enforcement agencies. It tells about the energetic and coordinated actions of representatives of the Soviet and party bodies to eliminate the consequences of the accident, about the help of many thousands of people who sympathetically responded to the disaster. Interviews with eminent scientists highlight some important questions human relations with peaceful atom and long-term consequences of the accident. A detailed chronicle of memorable events and the reaction of the international community to them are presented.

Eagle E. "Black and white Chernobyl"

At the time of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Evgeny Orel lived in the city of Pripyat and worked in the city's financial department. "Black and White Chernobyl" was written on the basis of the author's impressions and is located at the intersection of a documentary story and journalism, representing partly a cross section of society in the mid-80s of the last century. The technical side of the disaster in the work is almost not affected. Having provided the title of the story with a modest subtitle "Notes of an Everyman", the author focuses on the psychological aspects of the post-accident period. Here and decency, and dishonesty, and tragedy, and love, because such is life in its complexity and diversity.

Sirota L. "Pripyat Syndrome"

This book has been waiting in the wings for 15 years. It all started with the script for the feature film How to Save You, Son? The film could not be filmed due to the crisis in the country, but the script remained and was later transformed into an autobiographical film story about the events in Pripyat on April 26-27, 1986, about the evacuation, about the fate of the author's relatives and friends - Lyubov Sirota from Pripyat.The city woke up on a sunny morning, not yet knowing that in a few days these green streets would become a death zone. Irina was evacuated from Pripyat, and soon an invisible death began to take away friends and acquaintances. She experienced the human "exclusion zone": the indifference of officials, the cynicism of official medicine ... Irina begins to lose her sight. Weaker, she learns about the terrible illness of her son, who can only be saved by an operation abroad - a miracle for which there is almost no hope left. But the woman does not back down. She and the baby are waiting for new trials and betrayal, through which only faith will help.

SopelnyakB."Chernobyl fault"

These people are rarely known by sight. But they are always remembered, as soon as a terrible misfortune happens somewhere - a fire. And it doesn't matter if it's a residential building, a factory shop, a nuclear power plant or the endless taiga. On April 26, 1986, a power unit exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and a severe fire started. A lot has been written about this tragedy, but not about the people who were the first to take the brunt of the elements. The story "Chernobyl Fault" tells about what these unknown heroes managed to do.

Fishkin M. "The third angel trumpeted ..."

There are legends that many clairvoyants predicted the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. But the earliest prediction, perhaps, refers to biblical times. In "The Revelation of St. John the Theologian" there are the following words: "The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, burning like a lamp, and fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of this star is Wormwood; and a third of the waters became wormwood, and many of the people died from the waters, because they became bitter.” Wormwood has a popular name - Chernobyl ... This book is a true story about the relationships and behavior of people in extreme conditions of liquidation of the consequences of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the spring and summer of 1986, told by a participant in the events.

Shamyakin I. "Evil Star"

About how the Chernobyl tragedy affected the lives of ordinary people. The action in the novel takes place in one of the districts of the Gomel region.In the center is the image of the chairman of the district executive committee Vladimir Pylchenko, on whose shoulders lies the burden of liquidating the consequences of the accident, the fate of his family: the youngest son Gleb is an engineer at a nuclear power plant, the elder Boris, a pilot officer, having visited Afghanistan twice, dies. A mother's heart can't take it...The novel begins very symbolically from the scene of preparing the wedding and the celebration itself, but unfortunately the happiness of the newlyweds was very short-lived. The groom, who worked as an engineer at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, breaks down from the second day of the wedding celebration when he finds out that something happened at the station. The fate of all the heroes of the novel will not turn out in the best way, but the most important tests will have to be endured by the newly-made newlywed.

Shcherbak Y. “Chernobyl. Documentary Narrative»

The documentary narrative "Chernobyl" was conceived by the author as an artistic study of the causes of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. " For three years now I have been living and suffering from Chernobyl, trying to understand the causes of the accident and its consequences, constantly thinking about the heroes and criminals of Chernobyl, about its victims - past and future; I correspond, meet with many people involved in this tragedy, listen and write down more and more new stories. Sometimes I think presumptuously that I already know everything or almost everything about the accident - but no, in the story of a stranger or in a letter that came from afar, an unexpected, piercing detail suddenly flashes, another new drama appears, the Chernobyl plot, it would seem so familiar , makes another sharp turn". The voices of peasants and academicians, NPP operational personnel and firefighters, military specialists and priests sound in the book. According to eyewitnesses, the picture of the development of the accident was reconstructed for the first time, numerous unknown publications of the Western press about the Chernobyl events. He was the first to speak the truth. For the first time, it was he who mentioned a terrible tragedy during the construction of the sarcophagus: a helicopter crashed. “Horror ... the helicopter “folded”, crumbled. He just caught on the cables of the crane. PEOPLE died." There are books that you believe. You shudder with horror, but you read it and you can't put it down. Human destinies float before your eyes. And it seems that people are no longer strangers, but close, relatives. And there is no place for the usual, everyday indifference.

Yavorivsky V. Wormwood

The author worked as a correspondent at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. On the material of his essays from Chernobyl, the novel "Mary with Wormwood at the End of the Century" was written. Yavorivsky's novel is almost entirely a work of art. Here is what the author put as an epigraph to it: “It is not enough to tell about these events. So I'm trying to help you see them. Hence the style. Maybe it's a video novel. The action takes place in a young town of nuclear power engineers and in a village located in a 30-kilometer zone. The writer tells us about the life of his characters before the tragedy, and how it changed after.

Yaroshinska A. "Chernobyl. 20 years later. Crime without punishment

For the previous book-investigation “Chernobyl. Top secret" Alla Yaroshinskaya was awarded in 1992 "an alternative Nobel Prize". In the new book, Alla Yaroshinskaya publishes many previously secret Chernobyl materials: documents of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU, correspondence of medical and party officials shocking with its cynicism, documents of “Chernobyl resistance” to the authorities, the results of research by independent scientists. To one degree or another, nine million people in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia have already suffered from a nuclear catastrophe. But this number is far from final - Chernobyl continues to threaten each of us.

G. Medvedev: « I walk along the graves, stopping for a long time near each one. I put flowers on gravestones. Firefighters and six nuclear operators died in terrible agony between May 11 and 17, 1986. They received the highest doses of radiation, took the most radionuclides inside, their bodies were highly radioactive, and, as I already wrote, they were buried in sealed zinc coffins. So demanded the sanitary and epidemiological station, and I thought about it with bitterness, because the earth was prevented from doing its last work - turning the bodies of the dead into dust. Damn nuclear age! Even here, in the eternal human exodus, thousands of years of tradition are violated. You can’t even bury, humanly, you can’t betray the earth. That's how it turns out ... And yet I say to them: peace be upon your ashes. Sleep well. Your death has stirred up people, they have at least an inch moved away from hibernation, from blind and gray diligence ... Let us bow our heads before them - the martyrs and heroes of Chernobyl. So what is it, the main lesson of Chernobyl? The most important is the feeling of unsteadiness human life, its vulnerabilities. Chernobyl demonstrated the omnipotence and impotence of man. And he warned: do not revel in your omnipotence, man, do not joke with him. For you are the cause, but you are also the effect. Ultimately, this torments the most: those strands of chromosomes cut by radiation, killed or mutilated genes, they have already gone into the future. Gone, gone...»