Heroes of Chernobyl. Liquidators of consequences of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant

Having built the first nuclear power station in the USSR in 1954 and forcing the atom to serve peaceful purposes, humanity believed in finding the cheapest electricity. In the 80 years of the XX century, there were already 360 nuclear power plants in the countries. On April 26, 1986 , the world public learned its true price: tens of thousands of human lives, lost from radiation and its consequences, 300,000 homeless, abandoned cities and villages. But the victims could have been even greater, if not for the people, the real heroes of Chernobyl, who had prevented an even greater catastrophe at the cost of their lives.

Chernobyl accident

On the night of April 26, residents of the Ukrainian cities of Pripyat and Chernobyl, sleeping 4 and 18 km respectively from the nuclear power plant, where most of the adult population worked, were sleeping peacefully. In the panel 4-th unit, where the reactor No. 4 was tested, their tragic fate was decided for many years. As the government commission subsequently determines, during the tests, the permissible parameters that caused uncontrolled processes that led to the explosion of the reactor were violated. 50 tons of nuclear fuel burst out, which is 10 times higher than that of the infamous Hiroshima.

Punishment will be incurred by the management of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant: the testing assistant of the deputy chief engineer A. Dyatlov and the director of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant B. Bryukhanov will receive a term of 10 years. From the effects of radiation, the first will die from life in 1995. The chief engineer will lose his mind. Only in the nineties the government commission acknowledges that the fatal error in the design of the reactor itself became the main culprit of the accident. Be that as it may, the first participants of the Chernobyl accident are station employees. When the building of the power unit collapsed, two died, all the rest (134 people) became ill with radiation sickness, of which 24 soon died (28 with firefighters).

Standing on the path of further disaster

After two explosions with a difference of two seconds (at 1 hour 23 minutes), the reactor was completely destroyed, triggering about 30 fires. Station operators were the first who without hesitation rushed with fire extinguishers to eliminate them. While director V. Bryukhanov, who arrived at 2 o'clock at the station, was in a state of shock, in the electric shop fought for the prevention of a hydrogen explosion, which could be covered by Minsk, which was more than 300 km distant.

The country must know the names of the heroes of Chernobyl. The 47-year-old deputy head of the shift Alexander Lelechenko personally blocked the supply of hydrogen to the engine room, on the roof of which there was already a fire.

For four days he stayed at the workplace, eliminating the consequences of the Chernobyl accident and ensuring the safe operation of the first three nuclear power units. From an incompatible dose of radiation to life, Alexander Lelechenko died on May 7, having already received the posthumous title of Hero of Ukraine in two thousandths.

Genuine heroes - firefighters of Chernobyl

A military alarm raised the firefighters' guards from Chernobyl and Pripyat, the first of which arrived at the station 7 minutes after the catastrophe began. 28 people rushed to fight the fire under the leadership of lieutenants Vladimir Pravok and Victor Kabenko. Both are 23 years old, but with their example they led the fighters, giving clear commands and being where the most difficult. The general leadership was carried out by Major Telyatnikov, under the leadership of which there were 69 people and 14 units of equipment. Practically without protective equipment, having only mittens, helmets and canvas robes, not using gas masks of KIP-5 because of high temperatures, until three nights the firemen did not suspect about the deadly radiation level.

By four o'clock in the morning the fire had been localized, by six it had been extinguished completely. Losing in the fight with fire consciousness, many firefighters received a lethal dose of radiation and were sent for treatment to Moscow and Kiev. Of the 13 people treated at the Sixth Clinical Hospital of the capital, 11 died. Among them Victor Kabenok and Vladimir Pravik, who became a father a month before the tragedy. Doctors say that the chosen technique for treating Dr. Gale was wrong. Professor Leonid Kindzelsky in Kiev, who used his own method of treatment, managed to save all patients. Three firefighters, Vladimir Pravik, Victor Kabenko and Leonid Telyatnikov, were awarded the title of Heroes of the Soviet Union. It was only the latter who managed to survive to the rank of general.

Firefighters - Heroes of Ukraine

Three firefighters from among the first caught on the site of the disaster received the title of Hero of Ukraine. Among them, Vasily Ignatenko, a 25-year-old senior sergeant. At the cost of his life, a young man pulled three of his comrades who had lost consciousness from radiation from the fire. His pregnant wife could not save her daughter, receiving radiation when she visited her husband in a Moscow hospital. The dose was fatal to the newborn.

26-year-old sergeant Nikolai Vashchuk and 23-year-old Nikolai Tytenok were among those whom Ignatenko saved. But they all have the same destiny - to die in the hospital. Both worked at the highest altitude, preventing the spread of fire to the third power unit. It was there that the level of radiation was the highest. Heroes of Chernobyl left a grateful memory, and two more sons.

Firefighter - Hero of Russia

The head of the department of the Main Directorate of Fire Protection of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Maksymchuk arrived at the Chernobyl NPP as a member of the government commission. He had a share to lead the fire fighting on the night of May 23. This story was kept quiet for a long time: the threat of a new explosion of the 4th reactor arose after the ignition of circular pumps and high voltage cables. Not allowing firefighting calculations, with the reconnaissance group the lieutenant colonel infiltrated the place of the fire. Having established the degree of danger and revealing the level of radiation (250 roentgen per hour), Vladimir Maksimchuk personally organized rescue operations, determining the maximum time spent in the fire area by ten minutes.

Special fire fighting equipment was introduced into the fire fighting zone, and the combat calculations constantly changed, informing each other of the changes taking place. The commander with each group again and again found himself at the most dangerous point, serving as an example of personal courage. This is for the country for many years - the most "secret" feat. Heroes of Chernobyl were presented for awards, and forty fire fighters, led by the commander, would be unknown on the hospital bed. In 1994, at the age of 46, and the rank of Major General of Internal Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Vladimir Maksimchuk died, being posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Russia in 2003.

Who are the liquidators?

One of the first eyewitnesses who took off the reactor after the accident was the news agency operator Igor Kostin. He saw a picture of a complete rout, as if after an atomic war. The consequences of the Chernobyl accident are not only the release of nuclear fuel, but also the strongest radioactive contamination on the area of 200 thousand square kilometers. The smoldering reactor continued to throw out radioactive gas and dust into the atmosphere, it had to be stopped. The possibility of a re-explosion was possible because of the danger that a concrete slab would crack under the reactor, and the magma would be connected to the water.

At the same time, the authorities kept silent about the consequences of the disaster, and the first publications in the press appeared only 36 hours later. The radiation cloud was recorded in Europe, and the full-scale evacuation of the population from the nearby area, which went down in history as a zone of alienation, has not yet begun. People began to be evacuated from a radius of thirty kilometers after the measurements made by the military group of Colonel Grebenyuk in Pripyat. They not only showed a catastrophic increase in radiation during the day, but also shocked the Institute of Atomic Energy with absolute figures. The radiation background exceeded the permissible standards by 600 thousand times!

In the place of evacuated residents who left the contaminated territory within a week, specialists from the first hours of the accident were brought in to work at nuclear power plants and military units. Later they began to be called liquidators. 600 thousand people were involved in the elimination of the consequences of the disaster after President Gorbachev's address on television 18 days after the tragic events began.

Army feat

Each of those who came to eliminate the consequences of the accident, well aware of what Chernobyl. Hero-liquidators do not regret years later that they had to stand up against an invisible enemy - penetrating radiation. Despite the health problems and the death of friends from serious illnesses. 100 thousand of them are representatives of the army, including 600 helicopters, who did everything to silence the emergency reactor. The government commission for eliminating the consequences of the accident included academician V. A. Legasov, who developed the composition of the mixture for pelletizing into the reactor zone: sand, boric acid and lead. Within 48 hours, work began, for which the best helicopter pilots, including those recalled from Afghanistan, were brought in.

The radiation level above the reactor was 9 times the lethal dose, the air temperature at an altitude of 200 meters was 120-180 degrees. In conditions of hot radioactive air and danger to life, soldiers practically dumped bags weighing 80 kg with their bare hands, and pilots performed up to 33 sorties a day, immediately receiving radiation at 5-6 x-rays. It took 6,000 tons of the mixture to reduce the release of lethal substances by 35%. Among the helicopter pilots there are Heroes of the Soviet Union. One of them is Nikolai Melnik, who dropped a six-hundred-gram tube with measuring instruments into the reactor to find out the nature of the processes inside to avoid repeated explosions. This filigree operation went down in history under the name "Needle".

Stock Warriors

The liquidators of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are not only professionals, but also former soldiers and officers aged between 20 and 30 years, involved in army training. Everything around the fourth reactor was strewn with radiation fuel. The most complicated graphite and radioactive debris had to be removed from the roof where robotics was used. But the overshooting level of radiation has disabled it, so it became necessary to attract people. These heroes of Chernobyl went down in history as "biorobots". Major-General Tarakanov supervised the operation to remove radioactive elements, having calculated that even in a protective suit a person can not be in the radiation zone with 7000 roentgens for more than forty seconds.

In order to reset radioactive debris in two shovels, young men with a weight of protection of 26-30 kg for 2.5 weeks climbed to the roof, risking life and health. Igor Kostin and Konstantin Fedotov had to repeat his small feat five times. In reward "biorobots" received an army certificate of the liquidator and a premium of one hundred rubles. According to the forecasts of physicians, one in five of these guys will die before they reach 40. The war with the invisible enemy did not end with the completion of the work to eliminate the Chernobyl accident.

Construction of the sarcophagus

Most at the emergency station needed professionals. The firemen prevented a new explosion, pumping out the water under the concrete slab of the reactor, the miners dug a tunnel 150 meters from the third power unit to install a cooling chamber in liquid nitrogen, and the engineers of the Kurchatov Institute cut the surviving walls with an autogen to determine the degree of danger. The whole country mobilized to help the affected areas, in fact, a front-line situation was created. An account was opened for donations, which was received by 520 million rubles within six months. The final stage of work on taming nuclear energy was to be the construction of a protective sarcophagus for the burial of the "smoking" reactor. There was no analogue to such an object in the world, therefore those who designed and built it in conditions close to combat, the real heroes of Chernobyl.

206 days was required to build a concrete shell reactor weighing 150 tons and a height of 170 meters. Lev Bocharov, one of the developers of the facility, recognizes that the hardest part was that each detail had to be designed separately to avoid unnecessary sacrifices. Remote construction led to the fact that, despite the labor costs of 90 thousand people, the use of a huge number of metal structures and cement, after 28 years, there was a collapse of the hanging slabs to several hundred meters. More flights in helicopters in 2007 and radiation measurements showed that the power unit is still a danger. Therefore, today a new project "Shelter-2" is being implemented with the participation of European countries and the United States of America.

The 30-kilometer area around the nuclear power plant is still a zone of alienation, where people's lives are fraught with danger due to radioactive contamination. Pripyat turned into a preserved monument to the 1986 tragedy.

Heroes of Chernobyl Dedicated

The tragedy at the Chernobyl nuclear power station showed the whole world what could happen if nuclear energy is getting out of control. It intensified the process of nuclear disarmament and, in fact, became the beginning of the end of the USSR. But it also demonstrated to the world community the courage and heroism of ordinary people of different nationalities who stood shoulder to shoulder in the name of saving European civilization. The leader of the Communist Party of Ukraine V.Shcherbitsky, who contributes to concealing the true scale of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, will not commit suicide, the scientist VA A.Legasov can not survive the tragedy, feeling the guilt of the scientific community in the event. But there is nothing to be ashamed of those who will forever live in bronze and our memory. Vyacheslav Kokuba on the 25th anniversary of the tragedy in Ukraine composed the song "Glory to the Heroes of Chernobyl", which refers to the gratitude "to those who saved the world from the tragedy, those who have saved their honor and uniform."

In Ukraine, a medal "The Hero of Chernobyl" was instituted, which is still awarded to liquidators who showed special courage in a difficult period for the country. Three years ago, the award was found in Kyrgyzstan by the doctor Iskender Shayakhmetov, who works in a hundred meters from the block that saved the lives of dozens of people. And in the Kiev Institute of Radiation Medicine there is still an unequal struggle with the invisible enemy for the life of the former liquidators. To Professor Anatoly Chumak go from all corners of the former USSR. Many cities have monuments to courageous Chernobyl heroes, many of whom passed away from the consequences of radiation sickness years later.