SIRENS BLARE
1:23 am...
..the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is rocked by an explosion.
The nuclear reactor itself is physically destroyed.
There is complete shock in the control room.
Radiation shoots upwards,
creating a purple column of light.
The greatest-ever nuclear accident,
it will have far-reaching consequences that will change
the course of history.
But for 48 hours, the world knows nothing.
The Soviet government covers it up...
..and the locals are locked in a contaminated city.
This is a police state.
The KGB swings into action.
The phone lines are cut and roadblocks erected.
No-one's allowed in or out.
By the time the radioactive winds reach Sweden,
the people in Pripyat still don't know anything about
the danger they're in.
This is the untold story of the people living
in the shadow of Chernobyl...
..the first responders battling the blaze...
..and the forgotten heroes who risked everything
to prevent an even bigger global catastrophe.
Over 48 hours leading up to the evacuation of Pripyat,
an unprecedented disaster unfolds,
exposing one of the deadliest cover-ups in history.
They don't know that nothing will be the same ever again.
Their world has changed forever.
The survivors of the Chernobyl disaster
have returned to their former hometown of Pripyat.
Some of them for the first time in 40 years.
Atomgrad comes from the Russian word for 'atomic city'.
It is literally that, a city built next or near
a nuclear power station.
Pripyat is a town built to house the employees
and the construction workers who work at the plant.
It's a city that owes its life
and death to the Chernobyl nuclear power station.
This ghost town lies at the heart of a vast
radioactive exclusion zone
that covers more than 2,500 square kilometres.
It was once a thriving community of 50,000 people.
But they left under a cloud of deception.
They've returned to tell their own stories
and relive the city's final days
in the wake of the worst nuclear disaster in history...
..a 48-hour period that truly changed the world.
By late afternoon, people are clocking off for work,
getting ready for the weekend.
And it's a big one, it's the weekend before the May Day holiday,
which is a huge deal in the Soviet Union.
Pripyat, it's a kind of exemplary socialist city.
Very modern.
Very nicely laid out, with lots of open spaces,
green spaces, parks, playgrounds.
It's surrounded by a very nice countryside,
there are lovely woods.
There is the River Pripyat.
So the nice surroundings also match
nice facilities in the city.
There are two stadiums.
There are two swimming pools.
So its population can enjoy these kind of gifts of the state.
They are rewarded for the important work that they do
for the nuclear industry.
Chernobyl's construction is part of a Soviet drive
to harness nuclear energy...
..to both meet surging electricity demand
and catch up with the West.
Science is the front line of the Cold War
ideological battle between the Soviet Union and the United States.
And nuclear science is the absolute
darling of the Soviet government and Soviet leadership.
Section by section, it was going to be brought online,
reactor by reactor,
to start powering Kyiv
and the entire region.
Each reactor can generate 1,000MW of electricity,
which is enough to power more than a million modern homes.
By 1986, Reactor 4 is online, and work
is already under way on Reactors 5 and 6.
If the plans are realised, this will become the biggest
nuclear complex in the world.
People thought of atomic science
as related to atomic weapons.
And once the Soviet Union
had its atomic weapons, there was a need for a rebranding.
So the Soviet Union starts to use the term...
.."the peaceful atom".
You can see the dichotomy
in nuclear technology
when you look at one of the tallest buildings in Pripyat,
which talks about, "May the atom be a worker and not a soldier,"
and it reflects the enthusiasm
for the peaceful applications
of atomic energy.
One of the great cities of the Soviet empire
would soon be fuelled entirely
by peaceful nuclear power.
Senior operator of Reactor 4
Aleksandr Zelentsov is at home preparing for work.
But at 9.00pm, he receives a phone call from his colleague
Valery Khodemchuk, asking to take the night shift.
So Aleksandr will now clock on in the morning.
Piotr, who also had a late shift change,
is enjoying his unexpected night off.
He invites friends back to his apartment
opposite the fire station, where they continue
drinking vodka and Soviet champagne.
As Aleksandr's opposite number,
Valery Khodemchuk, prepares for the midnight shift...
..a call comes into the plant.
A delayed safety test is finally given the go-ahead.
It's now nine hours overdue.
The question that this test was supposed to check
or to give answers to was
what if there is an electricity cut, a power failure?
With regard to this specific safety test,
to see if the turbine could freewheel
and provide enough power to the reactor
that it would keep the cooling water circulating
for long enough for the emergency generators to start,
that's a perfectly reasonable test to do.
They had, however, made three previous attempts
to do this test, which had been either unsuccessful
or inconclusive.
So, this was their fourth bite at the cherry.
In charge is a senior manager desperate to finally
get the test signed off.
Anatoly Stepanovich Dyatlov
sees the promise of promotion ahead.
All he's got to do is run this experiment.
The reactor has now been running at reduced power
for most of the day, and a shift change is imminent.
Dyatlov decides he will press ahead once the night shift arrives.
The day shift, the A team,
they clock off at the end of the workday on Friday.
The next team that comes on at midnight
has not been prepared at all for what's in store for them.
They had not been briefed.
Piloting the reactor is a 25-year-old engineer.
He's been in the job for just two months.
Dyatlov is a bully, he's unpleasant.
He's putting these inexperienced staff under pressure.
Without realising, the young engineer mistakenly allows
the computer to bring reactor power down to near zero.
WARNING SIRENS WAIL
At 12.30, the power output
from number 4 Reactor is dropping.
There are alarms going off...
..there are lights flashing.
If you run a reactor like that at low power,
then some of the product of
the nuclear reaction will build up in it,
in particular, a thing called Xenon,
which will, in the jargon, poison the reactor.
Dyatlov insists they pull out the graphite control rods
to help speed up the reaction and increase power.
Two of the operators initially refuse,
concerned that the reactor is dangerously unstable.
But when Dyatlov threatens them, they back down.
Control rods essentially are the throttle
that try and keep the power steady.
So, you need more power, you pull the control rods out.
And they reach the point where a lot of the control rods
are fully out of the reactor,
and they're still not seeing the power going up.
Eventually, by 1am,
they managed to raise the power to 200MW.
It's nowhere near the minimum 720MW stipulated for the test,
but Dyatlov is adamant it's good enough.
They cut the power and let the turbines freewheel for 36 seconds.
When they think they've concluded the test,
they press this AZ5 button, which shuts the reactor down.
But the readings begin to confuse the scientists.
SIRENS WAIL
The reactor starts heating up,
and the reaction starts speeding up.
The men hear a deep thud and are nearly thrown off their feet
as an explosion rocks the building.
Outside the complex, Sergei is still fishing
in the power plant's cooling pond.
He's one of the very few to witness the immediate aftermath.
EXPLOSION
A strange purple beam of light illuminates the night sky.
SIRENS AND ALARMS BLARE
The scientists in the control room are baffled.
They've hit the emergency shutdown button -
in their minds, the ultimate fail-safe.
Sergei and his colleagues cycle over to take a closer look.
What they see sends shivers down their spines.
CLOCK TICKS
THUNDER RUMBLES
At 1.23am on Saturday, the 26th of April 1986...
..engineers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine
feel the shudder of two explosions.
There is complete shock in the control room.
They don't understand - what has just happened?
Is it an earthquake or an enemy attack?
A nuclear war may have started.
They're constantly working
on the premise that a reactor
cannot explode.
Soviet propaganda, supported by the USSR's top atomic scientists,
has long reinforced the idea that these reactors
are the most reliable in the world.
But the unthinkable has happened.
The nuclear reactor itself is physically destroyed,
so it's broken up.
The lid has been blown off.
The temperature in the core approaches a level
similar to the surface of the sun
before blowing the 1,000-tonne lid and the roof clean off.
You've got some extremely radioactive material
which is completely uncontained
and on fire.
The fire station in Pripyat is immediately alerted.
At 1.28am, the phones start ringing off the hook.
PHONE RINGS
Men of the third watch look over to see
a mushroom-shaped cloud filling the moonlit sky.
With Piotr off duty, his friend Volodymyr Pravik is in charge.
SIRENS WAIL
They scramble into the fire trucks and head out.
It's only two minutes by road.
Lieutenant Pravik immediately
radios signal number three, which is the highest alert
which will bring all the fire brigades
in the entire Kyiv region to the power plant.
But he doesn't wait for them to arrive.
He and his crew go into this burning inferno without waiting.
And they find soon that they're battling
against something that is quite different.
Their bodies begin to tell them that this is no ordinary fire.
Men begin vomiting, a symptom of radiation sickness.
One of the team goes blind.
Their hands and feet begin to scald
and burn from touching chunks of graphite spat out of the core.
Back in Pripyat, Piotr turns in
after a night of drinking with friends.
Piotr arrives around 2.30am.
He's ordered straight up onto the roof of the complex.
And he goes onto the roof of the Turbine Hall
to stop the spread of the fire to another reactor
in unit number three.
Piotr's colleagues on the roof start feeling seriously ill.
Not yet suffering symptoms himself,
he stays behind and is soon one of the last on the roof.
Senior operator of Reactor 4, Aleksandr Zelentsov
is suddenly awoken by his phone.
He's called to the plant immediately.
His first job is to help fully disconnect
Reactor 4 from Reactor 3.
They share some of the same systems and infrastructure,
so it needs to be isolated.
Then, he goes in search of Valery Khodemchuk,
his colleague who had earlier taken his night shift.
But the inside of Unit 4 is a tangled web of destruction.
Unlike the firefighters, Aleksandr is fully aware
that he's potentially receiving a fatal dose of radiation.
There's no sign of Valery Khodemchuk.
His body is never found.
At 4am, senior management gathers in the underground bunker
designed to withstand nuclear attack.
Anatoly Dyatlov, the man in charge of the ill-fated safety test,
joins them, weak and retching,
yet still downplaying the incident.
Dyatlov tells the senior management that it's all contained -
it's just a hydrogen explosion.
There is no breach in Reactor Number 4.
The bosses are more than happy to pass this on to their superiors.
The Soviet Union has got layers and layers of bureaucracy,
but there's no real accountability.
Truth isn't important in the Soviet Union.
And the entire Soviet system is designed
so that the Dyatlov's lie
is replicated right up the chain of command, all the way
to the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
Mikhail Gorbachev.
By the time Gorbachev receives the message,
Piotr is one of nearly 200 men bringing the fires under control...
..but the reactor core continues to burn.
Eventually, Piotr is called down from the roof
and heads to the decontamination showers,
where he sees his father, also a firefighter.
He's waiting for his boy to come out,
but it is in the shower that Petrov feels really sick,
and when he comes out, he can barely hear or see.
He only hears his father say to him, "Hold on."
And then he's taken to the hospital.
The hospital has invoked its crisis plan.
They've moved out all the routine patients,
they've opened up as many beds as they can,
and they're waiting.
They're waiting for the wave
that is about to hit them.
Radiation destroys cells,
it disrupts connective tissues,
and eventually, if doses are really, really acute, in fact,
it damages the central nervous system
and essentially renders you unconscious very rapidly.
But at first, it looks like a bad case of sunburn.
With no radiology departments and minimal training,
the hospital staff are initially confounded.
Here in an atomgrad - an atom city -
you'd think they would be prepared to deal with radiation accidents.
But, of course, nobody would admit
that anything could go wrong in a Soviet nuclear power station,
so nobody was prepared for the radiation effects on the human body
that came when something did go wrong.
They're treating patients with milk
before they realise these are no ordinary burns
and that their clothes are contaminated.
And that's when the nurses realise that this isn't gas poisoning
and they have to treat their patients differently.
They make them strip.
They take their clothes away
and lock it in a basement.
And they begin to administer IV drips,
and this is really the first thing
that begins to help alleviate their symptoms.
More and more patients are flooding in,
straining the hospital's limited resources.
By daybreak, the hospital records its first fatality.
The reactor is still freely spewing radiation into the atmosphere...
WHIRRING
..as daylight lays bare the true extent of the damage.
The people of Pripyat are only just waking up...
..to a city that has been completely sealed off from the outside world.
The truth about the enormity of the disaster that has just happened
will slowly start to dawn on the Soviet scientists.
But instead of alerting the world to the danger,
the Soviet officials will remain silent.
The authorities' first instinct is to try and cover it up.
The KGB swings into action.
They cut off all the phone lines to Pripyat and Chernobyl.
They close the roads. They don't let anybody leave.
They're worried about spreading panic.
They want to control the flow of information.
Just a few kilometres from the reactor,
the town's 50,000 residents are kept in the dark,
completely oblivious to the radiation
filling the air around them.
It's a lovely weekend - they go on picnics,
there are children playing in the playground.
There are even weddings going on in the city...
CHURCH BELLS PEAL
..and no-one tells them anything.
Radiation on the streets of Pripyat
is recorded at 25,000 times the normal levels.
By nightfall, it will be 90,000.
It's so high,
radiation particles strike the camera sensors,
causing bursts of light and flashes on the film footage.
Those measures are being observed by people,
and that tells people that something very dangerous is going on.
While the authorities keep Pripyat in lockdown,
they're preparing to save Moscow
from Chernobyl's radioactive fallout.
At 4pm, on the 26th of April 1986,
officials gather at the headquarters of the Pripyat Communist Party.
Senior management of the plant finally admits
that Reactor 4 has in fact exploded...
..and that pumping cooling water through the core is pointless.
Their efforts over the last 12 hours,
which have included several suicide missions,
were totally in vain.
Government officials are still pondering
whether to evacuate the city,
when the head of the military radiation reconnaissance team
bursts in.
He's taken readings outside the power plant
100 million times normal levels...
..enough to kill someone in close proximity within 15 minutes.
Engineers have also picked up another problem -
a significant amount of nuclear fuel
is still burning within the damaged reactor vessel.
Once there is a realisation that
the reactor can and has exploded,
there are new dangers that are
coming to minds of the scientists
working on the clean-up.
And one danger that becomes very real is
that it will continue to heat up in its core,
and that it will explode...
..and it could be a kind of explosion that will set off
the neighbouring reactor, in the Unit Number 3,
and then possibly the other two.
This could leave large swathes of Europe uninhabitable
for thousands of years.
The second problem that they're worried about
is kind of in the opposite direction -
that the reactor will melt, literally...
..and the radioactive fuel
and all the debris will get into the water supply.
From there, they will poison the Black Sea, the Mediterranean,
and finally the oceans.
That, again, would be potentially a global catastrophe.
The government commission into the accident finally concedes
that evacuation of the town is necessary.
But it's still 19 hours
until the population is relocated.
At the hospital, authorities prepare to spirit
the worst-affected patients away to Moscow.
Piotr is told to get ready.
But of course, the relatives are there -
they're besieging the hospital,
they want to see their husbands, their sons.
And this is where the authorities try a trick.
They're told by the people in charge,
"Go home and start packing a bag,"
to get them out of the way.
But the time they come back to the hospital,
their loved ones have gone.
In total, 26 firefighters and plant workers
are transported to the capital.
But when Piotr is assessed,
one of the doctors is amazed at his condition...
..and puts it down to the amount of vodka in his system.
Piotr and Pravik are in good spirits, even joking with staff.
There's an apparent recovery where people seem to get better,
but, actually, what's happened is
there has been long-term damage to key systems in the body,
and, actually, your ability just to do the normal
replacing cells has gone.
So people will then deteriorate again
after this so-called latent period.
At that point, you will either recover
or you will die.
It's the last time Piotr will see Pravik alive.
100km north of Chernobyl,
residents in the countryside of Belarus
witness a strange weather phenomenon.
They're looking up at the sky...
THUNDER RUMBLES
..they're seeing a strange colouration.
It's very dirty, it's black - this is the famous black rains.
People say they saw reddish, purple colours.
And they're also seeing aeroplanes flying in the sky.
They're seeing colours coming out from the rear of the aeroplanes.
Some have also even reported rockets being fired into the skies.
What they are seeing is the Kremlin's desperate response
to a growing threat against the capital city.
Up in the atmosphere,
there is lethal, very concentrated radioactivity.
Overnight of the 26th of April
to the 27th, we are getting wind
coming from the west to the east,
heading in the direction of Moscow.
The authorities decide to make it rain.
They decide that it would rain over Belarus.
The Soviet Union had the capability to fly through the clouds,
spread the chemicals that would cause the droplets to form,
that would cause the rain to fall out
before it reached Moscow.
They'll pull the radioactivity with it, down onto the ground -
that is the process of cloud seeding.
An army of pilots is ordered into the skies over rural Belarus.
That rain affects hundreds of thousands of people -
it makes Belarus the worst-affected territory.
70% of the Chernobyl nuclear fallout, radioactive fallout,
falls on the territory of Belarus.
Soon, people start flooding local hospitals,
displaying the syndromes of the radiation sickness.
So, this is the poisoning of the entire republic
that will have enormous long-term consequences on people's lives
for generations to come.
But the radioactive cloud
would soon become too big
for even the Soviets to control.
At midday, on Sunday the 27th of April, 1986,
life continues as normal in Pripyat.
By the time the radioactive clouds reach as far as Sweden,
people in Pripyat who are living right next to the plant
still know nothing about what has happened
or the danger in which they're in.
We have reports of one person
going up to the roof of his apartment block
and hoping to get a bit of suntan,
and he's taken aback by how quickly the suntan catches.
Above them is the sound of helicopters preparing an assault
on Chernobyl's Reactor Number 4.
So, military pilots are charged with the task
of flying over the open reactor
and dropping the bags with sand, clay and boron into the opening.
Boron is a very good way of suppressing a nuclear reaction.
Dolomite, clay are good for smothering graphite fires.
And also, they put lead in because
they were trying to reduce the radiation dose
coming out of the wrecked reactor
to people who were trying to work in the vicinity.
The liquidation campaign is now under way -
the beginning of a mammoth mobilisation of Soviet resources
that will ramp up in the coming days.
In Pripyat, fears over causing panic are finally put aside
for the health of the town's population.
1,200 buses and 240 trucks
are commandeered from Kyiv and the region.
The announcement about the evacuation comes at 1pm,
in the middle of a lovely Sunday afternoon.
This is the last thing people are expecting, really.
It's true, there's been an explosion,
but for 36 hours,
people have been told nothing about the radioactivity,
and so this order to evacuate comes like a bolt from the blue.
The people are outside,
there are children eating ice cream in the cafeteria,
and suddenly they're told to leave their homes.
WOMAN OVER LOUDSPEAKER:
They've been told that the evacuation
will only be for three days.
People are told to take only the most-essential items with them.
Thankfully, Volodymyr's mother is given a reprieve.
The mood is very calm, very orderly.
People get into the buses and the buses take off -
the operation proceeds pretty much as expected.
By 5pm, the evacuation is officially complete.
Around 45,000 evacuees depart the city...
..which is left an eerie ghost town.
Radioactivity knows no borders,
so the story had crossed over the border from the Soviet Union,
and was about to break internationally,
on Monday the 28th of April.
On the Monday morning, a worker at the Forsmark Power Station in Sweden
actually sets the alarms off on his way into work.
His shoe has picked up fallout from Chernobyl.
They quickly work out where it's coming from,
and the Soviets are forced to admit there has been an accident.
Despite requests from various countries for more information,
they refuse to offer up any more detail...
..but it's soon making headlines across the globe.
Brief and buried report of the biggest nuclear accident in history.
Is one that was clearly addressed
of the lethal effect being two to three miles, and then...
Exactly what caused the Chernobyl nuclear reactor to explode,
we don't yet know.
How many lives will have been lost
as an immediate result of the disaster
will be easier to calculate.
But how many people are doomed eventually
to fall victim to Chernobyl, we will never know.
Some of these children will die young.
On the 11th of May, the first control room operator dies,
with his skin charred black and eyes wide open.
Lieutenant Pravik succumbs to his injuries that same day.
It's another week before Piotr finds out.
He's told that all of his colleagues have died.
Their coffins are wrapped in plastic,
welded shut inside zinc boxes, and covered with cement.
In the weeks and months that followed the nuclear accident
at Chernobyl...
..the clean-up effort gathers pace.
The so-called "liquidators",
which comes from the Russian word for "eliminating",
are eliminating the consequences of the disaster.
So, the number of these people is quite mind-boggling really -
600,000 people and more
are drafted into these missions.
Miners tunnel under the reactor's foundations
to add a protective concrete slab and install a giant heat exchanger
to cool down the molten core
and prevent it melting into the groundwater.
Men are tasked with removing radioactive graphite from the roof,
so a sarcophagus can be built over the wreckage.
Nearly 4,000 so-called "bio-robots",
with home-made lead armour for protection,
shovel graphite blocks over the side and into the core.
They have 90 seconds, estimated to be a maximum lifetime dose.
A lot of the soldiers sent to decontamination missions
are young boys.
They're draftees, so they're between 18, 20 years of age.
And they have to deal not just
with the physical difficulties of decontamination,
but also with the psychological burdens.
They do it out of a sense of duty...
..because there is some understanding at this point
that this is needed to save people
or to prevent an even greater disaster.
On the 14th of May, 1986, two and a half weeks after the explosion...
..Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledges the accident in public
for the first time.
Mikhail Gorbachev has only been running
the Soviet Union for 13 months at this point.
He has been saying that the Soviet Union
needs to have glasnost, openness.
And taking all that time
to even tell a scrap of the truth
demonstrates that there is
no openness in the Soviet Union.
As pressure mounts at home and abroad,
Gorbachev is forced to follow through on his promise of glasnost,
as the Iron Curtain is gradually lifted.
So journalists begin to gain unprecedented access,
for example, to nuclear scientists.
This was an industry shrouded in secrecy...
..and once those floodgates are open,
it's very difficult to kind of keep shutting them down.
The real cause of the explosion is eventually revealed.
There is a fatal flaw in every Soviet reactor
that none of the scientists at Chernobyl,
on the night of the explosion, were aware of.
The problem is that this SCRAM system -
this automated safety system that is meant to shut
down the reactor very quickly in cases of emergency -
the problem is that it is deeply flawed.
The control rods, which are made of boron -
the material that does slow down the reaction -
those control rods have the tips that are made of graphite.
So, when the graphite tips are inserted into
the hot reactor to slow down the reaction, they do the opposite -
they speed it up.
So, as the control rods go back into the reactor,
they greatly increase the reactivity,
and that causes an explosion.
Some top officials and atomic scientists
had known about it for years, even decades.
The nature of the Soviet Union - the secrecy, the self-deception -
all of this is what causes the disaster in the first place.
I got the chance to ask a question
to Mikhail Gorbachev in person,
and the question I chose was,
"What was your biggest problem at the time of Chernobyl?"
Mikhail Gorbachev told me that
getting information was his biggest problem.
The Chernobyl disaster also gives a boost
to Ukrainian eco-nationalism
because it becomes a political issue that the Ukrainian intelligentsia
and cultural figures adopt as a national issue.
It becomes a Ukrainian tragedy.
But the refusal of Moscow, again and again, to recognise
the damage done to the health and environment in Ukraine
begins to kind of really strain
the relationship between Kyiv and Moscow.
INDISTINCT CHATTER
YELLING
As Gorbachev says, the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl
was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
MUFFLED YELLING
It helped change the map of the world in a few years.
The consequences of the disaster for the environment are enormous,
and the effects will last for centuries.
This makes it easy sometimes to lose the human dimension of the tragedy.
We are talking about impact on health, which is long-term,
the rise in cancer, and especially cancer in children,
thyroid cancer, all kinds of disabilities.
And I think it's really important to remember the people
who suffered and who sacrificed their lives, their health,
in trying to prevent an even bigger disaster,
an even bigger catastrophe.
Every year,
Ukrainians come together to honour the fallen -
those that died or suffered
at the hands of an unprecedented disaster.
SIGHING