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Exclusive report: Inside Chernobyl, 40 years after nuclear disaster It was 1.23am when disaster struck. A routine safety test led to a catastrophic explosion. Poor design and inadequate safety procedures saw radioactive material scattered around the globe. In just 48 hours, Chernobyl became the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. Forty years later, I have come to Ukraine to learn about its legacy. My first guide is Kateryna Shavanova, an academic who was studying radiation-consuming bacteria at Chernobyl when Russia invaded in 2022, but now works for the Ukrainian army’s chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear risk team. A patch on her uniform roughly translates to “It’s not time to drink iodine yet”, an optimistic reference to the emergency treatment for radiation poisoning. As we shelter from the cold in a former family home in the city of Chernobyl, which sits 15 kilometres south of the nuclear power plant that shares its name, Shavanova explains that, in truth, there is no straightforward answer to whether this region is now safe. It depends on who is asking and what they intend to do. What we can say for certain is that more than 100 different radioactive materials were released by the explosion of Chernobyl’s reactor 4 in 1986. One of... https://www.newscientist.com/article/2520367-exclusive-report-inside-chernobyl-40-years-after-nuclear-disaster/?utm_campaign=RSS|NSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home