Чернобыль: сорок лет

Chernobyl: Forty Years

B1 · Intermediate · non-fiction · 16 scenes · Premium story

Sixteen scenes on the 1986 disaster, from the Soviet Union's peaceful-atom decades and the design of the RBMK to a town evacuated for three days that nobody came back to. The test, the twenty seconds, the firefighters, two and a half days of official silence broken by a Swedish shoe, the liquidators on the roof, and the reach of the fallout — as far as Welsh hill farms restricted until 2012. It ends where the zone is now: an accidental nature reserve with wolves, bison and Przewalski's horses, and the old people who went home anyway.

Read Чернобыль: сорок лет in Russian

Characters

Pripyat (Припять) — The ninth atomgrad, founded 1970
The RBMK reactor (Реактор РБМК) — The Soviet answer to a Soviet problem
The liquidators (Ликвидаторы) — Roughly 600,000 people, 1986–1990
The self-settlers (Самосёлы) — The ones who went back

Vocabulary from this story

атом — atom
реактор — reactor
электростанция — power station
энергия — energy
электричество — electricity
топливо — fuel
мощность — power output
блок — unit
стержень — control rod
графит — graphite
пар — steam
турбина — turbine