No established legitimate authority was able to immediately address the situation and provide answers to questions such as: Is it safe to leave the house? Is it safe to drink water? Is it safe to eat local produce? Communicating protective measures early would also have most likely enabled the population to escape exposure to some radionuclides, such as iodine 131, which are known to cause thyroid cancer. Before Sweden’s announcement, the Soviet authorities were conducting emergency fire-fighting and clean-up operations but had chosen not to report the accident or its scale in full. Then, Swedish authorities correlated a map of enhanced radiation levels in Europe with wind direction and announced to the world that a nuclear accident had occurred somewhere in the Soviet Union. No reports were released until the third day after the Chernobyl explosion. ![]() Nearly 404,000 people were resettled, but millions continued to live in an environment where continued residual exposure created a range of adverse effects. ![]() km, which is more than the size of Denmark, were contaminated with cesium-137 and strontium-90, with 30-year and 28-year half-lives respectively. Agricultural areas covering nearly 52,000 sq. km of territories in the three countries were contaminated, which is almost half of the total territory of Italy. Based on the official reports, nearly 8,400,000 people in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine were exposed to the radiation, which is more than the population of Austria. According to official reports, thirty-one people died immediately and 600,000 “liquidators,” involved in fire-fighting and clean-up operations, were exposed to high doses of radiation. ![]() The force of the explosion spread contamination over large parts of the Soviet Union, now the territories of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. But seven seconds later, a surge created a chemical explosion that released nearly 520 dangerous radionuclides into the atmosphere. Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, 26 April 1986 - A routine 20-second shut down of the system seemed to be another test of the electrical equipment.
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