![]() Tasked with flying a red flag from the top of the reactor to hail the end of the cleaning work in October 1986, Alexander Yourtchenko, Valéri Starodoumov and Alexander Sotnikov each scored a bottle of Pepsi and a day off.Īnd they got the food. Not that they were not rewarded for dying too young. Any longer and they’d be hit by the amount of radiation a human could expect to receive in a lifetime. But, apparently, people could – so long as they remained on the roof for no longer than 40 seconds any one time. ![]() Robots were tried, but they could not cope with the high radiation. Liquidators, nicknamed “roof cats”, cleaned the roof of reactor 3. “The clever ones also added a vine leaf for extra comfort,” said Kostin. Others made their own clothes from lead sheets cut into aprons, covering them in front and behind. Liquidators were ill-equipped, often wearing anti-chemical warfare suits that offered no protection against radioactivity. Workers, known as ‘liquidators’, rolled the dried “bourda” (molasses) and buried the nuclear waste. Kostin’s photograph of Chernobyl survived the intense radiation.Īircraft sprayed the disaster site with a fluid that stuck the radiation to the ground. ![]() They have taken on new resonance following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These pictures were supplied for our original post in 2015. Kostin’s work was collated in the book Chernobyl: Confessions of a Reporter. The child was adopted by a British family and endured many operations. His 1998 photograph of a child in a special school for abandoned children in Belarus was nicknamed ‘the Chernobyl Child’. Kostin continued to record stories of those affected by the disaster, including pictures of gigantic plants and malformed animals in the 30-mile exclusion zone. More than 50 reactor and emergency workers were killed in the immediate aftermath. Hundreds of staff and firefighters tackled a blaze that burned for 10 days and sent a plume of radiation around the world. The high radiation ruined all of his pictures except for one (below).Ī series of explosions had destroyed Chernobyl’s reactor No. Within hours of the Chernobyl explosion, Kostin (27 December 1936 – 9 June 2015) and four other photographers flew over the nuclear power plant in a helicopter. Above is Ukrainian photographer Igor Kostin’s grainy picture taken on the morning of Apof the Soviet-era Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
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