With horror, humanity realizes how much evil it does on the planet that gave it shelter, and the biggest of them is nuclear disasters. It’s as if we don’t even think about the harm that huge industrial corporations bring with a high level of danger in their activities, because they strive only for profit, and material well-being is a priority for humanity today. And it, humanity, having broken into conflicting parts, is trying to defend its gains, forgetting that almost all nuclear disasters occur during the testing of weapons. This article will list the most terrible of them in terms of the amount of damage caused.
1954
The nuclear disaster in the United States occurred as a result of a test explosion in the Marshall Islands, which turned out to be more than a thousand times more powerful than the explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The US government decided to conduct an experiment in Bikini Atoll. And this explosion is only part of the monstrousexperiment.
What happened? Nuclear catastrophes, without exception, bring irreversible consequences, but in this case, events developed unprecedentedly. There was a monstrous disaster that destroyed all life in an area of 11,265.41 square meters. km. Nuclear catastrophes of this magnitude did not occur on Earth before March 1954. Completely disappeared 655 representatives of the fauna. So far, samples of water and bottom soil do not show positive results, it is extremely dangerous to be in these areas.
1979
Another nuclear disaster in the United States occurred on Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. An unknown amount of radioactive iodine and radioactive gases were released into the environment. This happened due to the fault of the staff, who made a number of mistakes, as a result, mechanical problems occurred. The general public was not allowed to know about this disaster, the authorities withheld specific figures in order to prevent panic.
It was impossible to even argue about the scale of pollution, since the country's leadership immediately began to assert that the emission was insignificant. However, such damage was done to the fauna and flora that it was impossible not to notice. People exposed to radiation in neighboring areas suffered from leukemia and cancer 10 times more than in other places. In 1997, the data was discovered and re-examined. Due to irreversible consequences, this accident is included in the global nuclear catastrophes on an especially large scale.
World's first
The very first thunderednuclear explosion in July 1945 in the US state of New Mexico. Robert Oppenheimer, who is considered the "father" of the nuclear bomb, led the testing of yet unexplored weapons. The first was plutonium, and the creators gave her the affectionate name "Thing". The next one was called "Fat Man", and it was "Fat Man" that fell three weeks later on the heads of innocent people. The sixth day of August 1945 became an unforgettable mournful milestone in the history of mankind.
The American military used the atomic bomb, dropping it on Hiroshima, a Japanese populous city that was literally wiped off the face of the earth. The capacity of "Fat Man" is eighteen thousand tons of TNT. More than eighty thousand people died at one moment, another one hundred and forty thousand died a little later. But the deaths did not end there either, they continued for years from both wounds and radiation. And three days later, the same fate befell the city of Nagasaki, where there were the same number of victims. Thus, the United States forced Japan to surrender in World War II.
1957 nuclear disaster
The accident in Windscale was the largest in the history of the UK. The complex was built to produce plutonium, but later it was decided to convert it to the production of tritium - the basis for hydrogen and atomic bombs. As a result, the reactor could not withstand the load, and a fire started in it.
Workers, without thinking twice, flooded the reactor with water. The fire was eventually extinguished. But the whole area was contaminated - all the rivers, all the lakes. Why did the nuclear reaction process get out of hand?control? Because there was no normal control and measuring equipment, and the staff made a lot of mistakes.
Consequences
The energy release was too great, and the uranium metal in the fuel channel reacted with the air. As a result, the fuel elements of the fuel channels were heated to almost one and a half thousand degrees Celsius, they increased in volume and jammed in the channels, so it was not possible to unload them. The fire spread to one hundred and fifty channels with eight tons of uranium. Carbon dioxide could not cool the active zone. Therefore, on October 11, 1957, the reactor was flooded with water. The radioactive release was about twenty thousand curies, and long-term contamination with caesium-137 contained up to eight hundred curies.
Now metal fuel is not used in modern reactors. In total, more than eleven tons of radioactive uranium burned down there. The result was that the release of radionuclides began. Huge areas in Ireland and England were contaminated, and the radioactive cloud traveled to Germany, Denmark, and Belgium. In England itself, cases of leukemia have increased significantly. The contaminated water used by the locals has caused numerous cancers.
Kyshtym
Then, in 1957, there was an accident in the USSR in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-40, where the Mayak chemical plant is located. It was a very large nuclear disaster in Russia. Lake Kyshtym is located nearby, and this serious emergency was called the Kyshtym tragedy. At the end of Septemberthe cooling system at the plant failed, because of this, a container with highly radioactive nuclear waste exploded.
More than twelve thousand people were evacuated from the disaster area, twenty-three villages ceased to exist. The accident was liquidated by the military. In general, two hundred and seventy thousand residents of the Tyumen, Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk regions ended up in the pollution zone. Information about the tragedy was also carefully hidden, officially the truth was told only in 1989. In terms of damage, this is also a very large nuclear disaster.
At the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
In Ukraine, in Pripyat, there was an explosion of a nuclear reactor, which until recently was considered the world's largest man-made accident. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) was so severe that emissions into the atmosphere exceeded four hundred times the consequences of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But there the main damage happened from the shock wave, but here radioactive contamination became much more terrible. Since the accident, more than thirty people have died from radiation sickness in three months. More than a hundred thousand were evacuated. Why the explosion occurred is still not entirely clear, because the opinions of scientists are fundamentally different from each other.
Consequences
And the consequences were horrendous. The release of uranium dioxide into the environment was very large. Before the accident, there were about one hundred and eighty tons of nuclear fuel in the reactor at the fourth unit, up to thirty percent of which was discarded. The rest melted and flowed intofractures of the reactor vessel. But, in addition to fuel, there were also fission products, transuranium elements, that is, radioactive isotopes that accumulate while the reactor is operating. The greatest radiation danger threatens just from them. Volatile substances were ejected from the reactor.
And these are aerosols of tellurium and cesium, more than fifty percent of iodine - a mixture of solid particles and steam, as well as organic compounds, all gases that were contained in the reactor. In sum, the activity of the emitted substances was enormous. Iodine-131, cesium-137, strontium-90, plutonium isotopes and much more. The nuclear disaster of 1986 in Ukraine is still making itself felt. And people are still keenly interested in it. An interesting series in the genre of fantasy "Chernobyl. Exclusion Zone" was filmed. In the second season, the situation is transferred to the United States, where, allegedly, instead of the Ukrainian one, a nuclear disaster occurred on August 7, 1986 in the state of Maryland.
Results
It wasn't actually there. All results are summarized here. And this is more than two hundred thousand hectares of polluted soils, of which seventy percent are the territories of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. The nature of pollution was not uniform, everything depended on the direction of the wind after the accident. Particularly affected areas immediately close to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant: Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Gomel, Bryansk. Elevated background radiation was observed even in Chuvashia and Mordovia, radioactive fallout fell in the Leningrad Region. The largest part of plutonium and strontium fell out within a radius of one hundred kilometers, and cesium and iodine spreadmuch wider.
Danger to the population in the first few weeks was tellurium and iodine, they have a short half-life. But until now, and for many decades to come, isotopes of strontium and cesium, which lie on the surface of the soil in a layer, will kill in these territories. Cesium-137 is found in high concentrations in all plants and fungi, all insects and animals are contaminated. And the isotopes of americium and plutonium are stored without losing radioactivity for hundreds and thousands of years. Their number is not so great, but americium-241 will also increase, because it is formed when plutonium-241 decays. However, the nuclear disaster of 1986 was not as terrible in its consequences as the one that will be discussed below.
Fukushima
Today the accident at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant is not only the saddest event in the history of Japan, but also the worst in the entire existence of mankind on Earth. It happened on March 11, 2011. First, the country was shaken by a powerful earthquake, a few hours later the entire northern Japan was literally washed away by a huge tsunami wave. The earthquake broke the energy ties, and this was the main cause of the catastrophe, which has no equal yet.
The tsunami wave disabled the reactors, chaos began, the installations quickly heated up, there was no way to cool (the pumps did not work without electricity). Radioactive steam was simply released into the atmosphere, but still a day later the first block of the nuclear power plant exploded. Two more power units exploded next. And today, the level of pollution around Fukushima is unusually high.
The situation today
The decontamination that is being done there does not clean up the land, it just transfers the radiation to other places. All nuclear power plants in the north of Japan were stopped, and there is a whole chain of them - twenty-five nuclear reactors. Now they have been included in the work again, despite the protests of the public. The area is too seismological and the risk is huge. The same situation may well repeat with any of the other stations.
Almost eight hundred thousand terabecquerels of radiation were released into the atmosphere, which is not so much, about fifteen percent of the release in Chernobyl. But something else is much worse here. Polluted water continues to flow from the already destroyed station, radioactive waste is accumulating. The Pacific Ocean is becoming more and more polluted every day. Fish, even far from the Japanese shores, cannot be eaten.
Pacific Ocean
Three hundred and twenty thousand people were evacuated from the disaster zone - a thirty-kilometer zone. According to experts, the zone should have been much more expanded. Many times more radioactive substances were dumped into the Pacific Ocean than the emissions from Chernobyl. For the seventh year now, three hundred tons of radioactive water has been supplied there from the reactor every day. Fukushima has infected the entire ocean, even North America finds Japanese radiation off its coast.
Canadians prove it by presenting caught irradiated fish. The ichthyofauna has already decreased by ten percent, even the herring in the North Pacific has disappeared. The level of radioactive iodine, twenty days after the accident in western Canada, was increased by three hundred percent, and itall things grows. In the United States (Oregon), starfish began to lose their legs and decay, they have been dying en masse since 2013, when radioactive waters got there. The entire oceanic ecosystem of the region is under attack. The famous Oregon tuna became radioactive. On the beaches of California, radiation increased by five hundred percent.
Global silence
But not only the west coast of America suffered. Scientists talk about the contamination of the entire world ocean: the Pacific is currently up to ten times more radioactive than after World War II, when the United States tested its nuclear submarines there. However, Western politicians prefer not to say anything about the impact of the Fukushima tragedy. And everyone knows why.
Japanese "Tepco" is a subsidiary, and "daddy" here - General Electric, the world's largest company that controls both politicians and the media. They are not comfortable talking about the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
