Twenty years ago in the early morning of April 26, while most of Europe
lay oblivious and asleep, a chain of events had begun in Soviet Ukraine
that was to unleash a catastrophe of unprecedented scale. At 1:23 a.m.,
a massive surge of power in the fourth reactor at the huge Chornobyl
(Chernobyl) power station triggered an explosion that lifted the
1,000-ton lid off the reactor's core. Within hours a column of
radioactive material some 1 kilometer high was drifting northwest
across Europe. As panic gripped the continent, hundreds of thousands of
people, many of them volunteers, fought with astonishing courage to
control the accident. Twenty years on, what are the lessons of
Chornobyl and what are its consequences?
