40년 전 체르노빌의 핵 재앙

Photographs from the first days of the Chernobyl disaster and of the aftermath years later show the response, the evacuation and the long-term consequences of the world’s worst nuclear accident.

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant three days after the explosion in April 1986.Credit...Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images

By The New York Times

The reactor exploded early on April 26, 1986, sending a column of fire and radioactive debris high above the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union.

The fallout settled over the streets, schools and playgrounds of nearby cities like Pripyat. Trace amounts of particles were eventually detected across the Northern Hemisphere. It was the world’s largest ever accidental release of radioactive material.

In the beginning, the Soviet Union said little about the explosion, which was triggered by a safety test and exacerbated by design flaws. Officials obfuscated and denied. After radiation levels rose in Sweden, Soviet officials acknowledged that something had gone wrong. But they hid the scale of the disaster for months, even from the thousands of people sent to fix it.

Firefighters, miners, soldiers and civilians — who would come to be known as “liquidators” — shoveled debris and sealed the shattered reactor, without fully understanding the risks. They sometimes paid with their lives.

Pripyat was evacuated 36 hours after the disaster. Thousands of other residents nearby were ordered to do the same in the weeks and months that followed. The city and dozens of villages were left to rot. This corner of the Soviet Union became known as the Chernobyl exclusion zone, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island that remains restricted. The Soviet Union fell apart; Chernobyl remains in Ukraine.

These photographs — some taken in the first days after the explosion, others many years later — illustrate the immediate response, the evacuation and what was left behind.

In the first of these images, the cleanup workers called liquidators are walking past a temporary tent camp set up in the exclusion zone, which is about 1,000 square miles. In the early days of the cleanup, the workers, mobilized by the government, had little clue about the health risks they faced.

But the risks from the high levels of radiation were significant. In this photograph, a doctor checked a girl’s thyroid gland as other children waited their turns at a school in eastern Belarus, which neighbors Ukraine. At least 1,800 cases of thyroid cancer were documented in children who were under 14 when the accident occurred, a far higher rate than normal.

Miners wore little protection in May 1986 as they dug a tunnel beneath the exploded reactor. They were trying to prevent molten nuclear fuel from reaching the groundwater, which would have caused a far more dangerous release of radiation.

Employees continued working at the Chernobyl plant a few months after the disaster. The explosion destroyed Reactor 4. The plant’s other reactors kept running for years.

A worker in protective gear sorted through boxes of contaminated vegetables at a landfill in what was then West Berlin, where tainted produce was discarded after the disaster. Fallout from Chernobyl spread across Europe, poisoning crops far from the reactor.

A child from a contaminated area underwent medical examinations at a diagnostic clinic for radiation medicine in Minsk, Belarus, in 1991. Belarus received the largest share of Chernobyl’s fallout, more than Ukraine or Russia.

Children playing in Slavutych, a city built about 25 miles east of Chernobyl in the year 2000 to house displaced workers and their families. It replaced Pripyat, where residents never returned.

A stray dog sitting in front of Reactor 4 and a new steel confinement structure being built in 2013 to enclose the original concrete “sarcophagus” that was starting to decay. Many dogs in the exclusion zone are descendants of pets left behind during the evacuation.

The reception area of a hospital in Pripyat, in 2021, where firefighters and other emergency workers were initially treated after the disaster. Since the evacuation, the buildings have been left to crumble.

Discarded gas masks covering the floor of an abandoned school in Pripyat in 2016.

The control room of Reactor 4 at the plant in 2026. The safety test that triggered the explosion was held here.

Bumper cars in an abandoned amusement park in Pripyat in 2023. The city was founded in 1970 to house Chernobyl workers, less than two miles from the plant.

Soldiers from Ukraine’s National Guard training this month in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The area, closed after the 1986 disaster, was held by Russian forces for more than a month in 2022, when fighting in the zone damaged power lines and temporarily cut electricity to the plant.