Chernobyl Incident

Hi, I'm Sarah lang an

I'm doing my end of term project on the Sure noble incident.

And whenever we talk about incidents like this

First, we want to know what happened. So on April 26,

1986.

This tragic incident basically occurred

as a result of a flawed reactor design and poorly trained personnel.

So workers violated safety protocols and this caused the

power surge that eventually led to reactor for exploding.

And for weeks prior to this incident,

the workers had been running tests to see if the reactors and the turbines could um

could

maintain enough power

to continue running if there was a power outage. But each of these

Tests had proven to be unsuccessful and this power surge

caused the reactor 4 to explode and catch fire.

And this led to

many awful effects which I'll talk about.

So the first thing that we're going to look at is what are the impacts on humans.

Because all of this radiation from this nuclear

power plant has been released from this explosion.

So

the impact on humans. First off of course, a radioactive cloud spread across europe

and as a result of this, 335,000 individuals had to be

evacuated from the city and surrounding areas.

So it's not like just the one city where their plant was, had to be evacuated,

but it was surrounding areas because the radiation was so heavy

And from the initial explosion, 20 people died from it directly.

Um and most of these people were workers,

But thousands of other people are claimed to have been affected by this.

Like for example,

more than 6000 Children and adolescents

have developed thyroid cancer from the radiation

and that is just one number. There have been many websites that have stated that like

thousands of people have been affected by the radiation,

but it's kind of a for debate, like some people say like oh it wasn't the radiation,

but

aside from the impacts on humans,

I want to discuss the political and economic impacts.

So all in all this explosion costs $235 billion dollars in damages, which is insane.

And belarus, a surrounding area

Lost 1/5 of its agricultural land and of

course that will hurt them because agricultural land

develops money for them.

And also this field,

a global anti nuclear movement and this image here kind of hard to see,

but it is an image of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant

after its explosion.

So aside from these impacts,

let's talk about the impacts on the environment because of course it's

not good for all this radiation to just enter our atmosphere.

So from this um incident many trees die from the radiation.

There is a five mile radius around the Chernobyl power plant

that was known as the red forest because in that five mile radius

all the trees were red because they all had died from the radiation

and that's not good.

Um and scientists have found that lower rates

of beneficial bacteria are in the surrounding environment.

And this is within animals, trees, um

soils and this bacteria is really crucial for food

chains and for ecosystems of flourish in general.

And finally,

a more positive note is that wildlife numbers have increased from human absence.

And this is good.

However,

scientists have found some gene abnormal abnormalities such as um like albinism.

So wildlife is flourishing but that doesn't mean that they aren't

affected by the radiation that is still in the area.

So now onto the cleanup efforts

and the kind of now what situation?

So clean up efforts are expected to last until at least 2065.

Which is insane because this occurred in 1986. So that's almost

100 years later, about 80 years later.

And this area will not be habit.

That's a type of but this area will not be habitable for at least 20,000 years,

which is a very long time.

And that shows how strong radiation can be.

And also in 2016 a massive steel containment structure was placed

over to contain radiation and here's an image of it.

And this was only in 2016. So hopefully this can help

reduce radiation and

also speed up some cleanup efforts.

So that was my end of project

presentation for the Chernobyl incident. And I hope it has helped you

learn some about this tragic event,

but also not to be feared by nuclear energy

because nuclear energy can be a great thing.

But this was an awful incident that occurred from it.

Chernobyl Incident

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