For all budding geographers

The Industrial Revolution, started by mankind, enabled factories and power plants to exist and in the end we, mankind, ourselves caused a disaster related to our inventions. That is called a man-made disaster and one of them is what we will discuss today!

What is Chernobyl?

I'm not. I thought you were.

You're checking on the power plant, right?

Why did it happen?

Technicians at reactor Unit Four, the name of the power plant, attempted a poorly designed experiment. The workers had shut down the reactor's power regulating/emergency safety systems and core control rods were taken out at a seven percent power (too low for the power plant to function!). 

What was its impact or result?

Soon the chain reaction in the core went out of control and several explosions caused a fireball (ball filled with dangerous substances) which then blew off the heavy steel-concrete made lid of the reactor. This chaos caused the release of plenty of radioactive, unsafe material into the air, over great distances by air currents. This type of diffusion, or release, of the unsafe material is expansion diffusion since the spread of the material continuously grows larger wherever it lands. Soon after, a partial meltdown of the core took place.

What was done to fix it? 

Helicopters came to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, Ukraine on April 26, 1986 right before people were starting to be forced to leave the region. Hundreds of thousands of people indigenous (native) to areas of rural settlements could not afford to evacuate and stayed in contaminated areas. This separated people, cutting social interactions. On May 4, 1986, the heat and radioactivity were contained but were still very dangerous to workers there. This is why radioactive waste was buried at around 800 temporary sites. Later in the year the dangerous reactor core was closed up in a huge coffin-like container which later turned out to be an unsafe idea. Schools were abandoned following the disaster and multiple people died.