What happened at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, on April 26, 1986, was the biggest nuclear accident in nuclear history. It caused thousands of deaths through radiation and the sickness induced by it. Thirty three of those deaths were almost immediate, and the rest followed in the years after.
All of these deaths were caused by the explosion and following fire of the Number Four Reactor of the type RBMK (meaning Power Boiling Reactor) (Read, P. VII). It was a reactor manned by incompetent operators, untrained to handle it properly, and it held inside it 185 tons of uranium 235 (Read…
