The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
Located about 81 miles north of the city of Kiev, and about 12 miles south of the border with Belarus, the power plant was designed and built during the 1970s and 80s. The nearest town was the newly built city of Pripyat, which held almost 50,000 people in 1986 (the year of the accident).
View of the Chernobyl Nuclear power after the explosion on April 26, 1986, in Chernobyl:, Ukraine. (Photo by SHONE/GAMMA/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
A smaller town, Chernobyl, was home to about 12,000 citizens. The rest of the region was primarily farms and woodland. The power plant used four Soviet-designed RBMK-1000 nuclear reactors, now universally recognized as an inherently flawed system.
And that flawed system would cause the darkest years to come…