Chernobyl - The Catastrophe

In 1970 the Soviet Union began building the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. A prestige project, intended to be the largest nuclear power plant in the world - thanks to the super reactor RBMK. The Soviet reactor RBMK is a difficult to control system. Engineers and KGB agents warn the government in Moscow of fatal risks. In 1983 there was a serious accident in Chernobyl, but it is hushed up. The young nuclear engineer Nikolai Steinberg has been working on the gigantic construction site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant since 1971. During his studies in Moscow, he first found out about the secret reactor RBMK, which was created to supply the economy of the Soviet Union with energy. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant with four reactor blocks and the Ukrainian city of Pripyat are created.

On April 26, 1986 around 1:23 a.m., a reactor exploded in Chernobyl. What begins as a security test ends in the inferno. It is the biggest nuclear disaster in the world - to this day. Survivors like the nuclear engineer Boris Stolyarchuk describe the events of the accident night. The then 26-year-old experiences the explosions on Block 4 and is sure that he will not survive the night. The next morning the world is different. The young doctor Alexander Bugar was called to the Prypjat hospital early in the morning to treat the acute radiation and fire injuries of the first victims from the nuclear power plant. The young nuclear engineer Oleksiy Breus will meet his friend, the reactor driver Leonid Toptunov for the last time.

The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev receives secret communication about the explosion in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. How will he react to the catastrophe? Even after discovering a radioactive cloud about Sweden, Moscow is silent. Specialists on site hesitate to evacuate Pripyat. The contaminated city is only evacuated 36 hours after the catastrophe. The force of the explosion completely destroyed the Soviet RBMK super reactor. The reactor base plate, 2000 tons, was torn out of the anchorage: now there are more than 200 tons of uranium fuel and over 1800 tons of white-glowing graphite free. Radioactive particles rise up into the sky through heat and cover large parts of Europe.

The world demands information from the Soviet Union after the Chernobyl accident. Moscow turns the power plant staff into scapegoats and hides errors in Soviet technology. People in North Ukraine cannot miss the radioactive Fallout. In June 1986, the government in Moscow confessed the defeat against the radiation and had a restricted zone built. 130,000 people lose their homeland and are relocated. In the summer of 1986, Nikolai Steinberg dared to experiment with one of the Chernobyl reactors - he finally wants to prove that the RBMK has become the cause of the accident due to its construction. Moscow, however, continues in the theory that the power plant personnel are solely blamed with the disaster.