Scarred for life
40 years on, Chernobyl still questions humanity on how to safely harness nuclear energy
Updated: 2026-05-12 09:51
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Revisiting history
To this day, what lingers most deeply from this disaster are the people who came to help back then. Four years after the disaster, 600,000 people joined the dangerous cleanup.
Helicopters hovered above the exposed radioactive core, dropping sand and other materials to smother the fire. Workers washed radioactive dust from buildings and roads, buried poisoned machinery, cleared forests and hunted animals to slow the spread of radiation.
A group of the workers who live in Ukraine's Poltava region returned ahead of the 40th anniversary of the accident for a one-day trip to Chernobyl.
