Today marks the 38th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. What does the area look like today?

We are talking about an accident which, over time, resulted in numerous victims and which created problems over a huge area, affecting in particular the west of the Soviet Union and the east of North America, areas where it is believed that the clouds with radioactive fallout moved .

The accident at Chernobyl, from 1986, is considered the worst accident in the history of nuclear energy, especially since we are talking about a situation that the authorities in the Soviet Union announced late, and thus the countries in the area took measures to caution with some delay.

Today marks the 38th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. What does the area look like today?

What people know officially as the Chernobyl exclusion zone and unofficially as the Chernobyl “death zone” is, in fact, an area of ​​about 2,600 square kilometers located around the Chernobyl plant.

We are talking about an area that is about as big as the state of Luxembourg and from which, in 1986, hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated. Although it is considered that the land in the exclusion zone from Chernobyl is still contaminated and will be contaminated for a long time to come, the exclusion zone from Chernobyl has fallen prey to nature, the roads and houses of the past being covered with greenery.

Images of the abandoned city of Pripeat

The city of Pripeat, located about 1.5 kilometers from the Chernobyl plant, was the most affected by the Chernobyl disaster. We are basically talking about a locality that had around 50,000 inhabitants, most of them employed at the respective power plant.

Read also: 10 years since the nuclear accident. Residents of Fukushima are allowed to return home

Pripeat was only evacuated more than 36 hours after the accident, so many of the evacuated people had already been contaminated and suffered in the medium and long term.

What happened at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986

On April 26, 1986, an explosion occurred at reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl plant. The roof of the reactor, weighing 1,000 tons, was blown into the air. The explosion was followed by a fire and additional explosions. Radioactive leaks have also been recorded.

Read also: Chernobyl. And yet, nuclear accidents happen

Following the accident at Chernobyl, 400 times more radioactive material reached the earth’s atmosphere than at the accident at Fukushima (Japan) and several times more radioactive material than following the use of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.