Chernobyl Part 3: The Aftermath & Cleanup

After the explosion of Reactor 4, the Soviet Union mobilised over 600,000 people to contain a disaster it could not fully understand, using methods it improvised under extreme pressure. These workers — military reservists, firefighters, miners, engineers, and ordinary civilians — are known collectively as the liquidators.

The evacuation of Pripyat was delayed by 36 hours. By the time buses arrived on the afternoon of April 27, residents had already been exposed to significant radiation. They were told to bring documents and valuables for three days. Everything else — apartments, cars, pets — was left behind. Many of those possessions remain where they were abandoned.

On the roof of the reactor building, the most radioactive debris — chunks of graphite ejected by the explosion — had to be removed by hand. Remote-controlled robots sent by West Germany and Japan broke down in the intense radiation. Soviet military robots suffered the same fate. The solution was human workers, called biorobots, given lead-lined aprons and sometimes buckets. Each had 90 seconds on the roof before receiving a maximum permissible dose. They shovelled graphite over the edge and ran.

Beneath the reactor, engineers feared a second explosion if the burning core melted through the floor and contacted the water-filled basement. Miners from Tula and the Donbas region were brought in to dig a 150-metre tunnel by hand in sweltering heat, to install a cooling system. Three volunteers — Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bespalov, and Boris Baranov — waded through radioactive water to manually open the valves that drained the basement, preventing a potential steam explosion that engineers estimated could have contaminated half of Europe.

The original sarcophagus — a concrete shell built over the destroyed reactor — was completed in 206 days. It was built by workers who received their lifetime radiation dose in a matter of weeks.