"The Chernobyl alarm bell" a 85 minutes Realvideo document shot by Rollan Serguienko. Released in 1987. Liquidators at work, concerned people, firemen, doctors are seen and interviewed.
"Chernobyl, this bitter herb" a 98 minutes (in 2 parts) RealVideo movie released by the japanese NHK channel at Hiroshima in the early nineties.
On the night of 26th April 1986, the operators at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant noticed that things were going drastically wrong in the core of reactor number four. They began an emergency shutdown…
Too late!
A massive explosion erupted in the reactor and the 1,000 tons ferroconcrete roofings slabs were blasted aside. Fuel rod assemblies, fuel rods, graphite moderator blocks of a total weight of 140-150 tons were scattered across the roofs. A huge column of radioactive steam and debris shot high into the air. The radiation level ranged from 100 to 900 Rœntgen/hour !!
The result was the world’s most serious accident so far with a nuclear power station.
A few hours later the Moscow officials ordered : «The consequences of the accident should be “liquidated” at once.» The plan was to collect the debris, shift it to block 4 and dump it all into the ruins of the shattered reactor.
It turned out that remote control operated robots were unable to carry out the job, their electronic circuits being smashed by radiation.
The decision was taken to call for the bitterly named “biorobots”, the so-called “Liquidators”, flesh and blood people who did the job by hand. Later they built the gigantic metal and concrete sarcophagus.
Up to 800,000 workers and military personnel were involved. Many have died since then.
In the above picture (shot by Igor Kostin) "Liquidators" are at work on the roof of block 3. They move in the midst of highly radioactive rubbles, nuclear uranium fuel rods and radioactive molten graphite, which had been scattered all over the site. Men are equipped with scrapers, tongs, shovels, hooks and stretchers.
enjoy extreme tourism with the Chernobyl tour from the SAM travel company Ukraine !!
Don't laugh. Some people made it. Read the New York Times report.
Elena Filatova traveled the place by motorbike... "My favorite destinations leads North from Kiev, towards so called Chernobyl "dead zone".
"Les Liquidateurs", Editions Noir Délire, 218 pages
This is the background of the novel “Les Liquidateurs” which was published in 2002.
When the police officer Luc Brossard discovers the dead body of an irradiated woman in an abandoned factory near a southern suburb of Paris, the tempest is unleashed.
«Don’t your realise ! he shouts angrily, there are thirty containers full of nuclear shit lying there, spitting out the complete nuclear radiation alphabet : alpha, beta and gamma and you are right in the middle of it ! You’re going to die like a rat, like la femme à la baignoire !»
From now on Brossard is on the warpath and rapidly discovers that he has many foes : his boss, a nucleocrat, ukrainian gang killers and all those people who hate nuclear protestors.
Fortunately a guy shows up and introduces : «Pavel Touchine, Liquidator !»
So long after the catastrophe what remains to be liquidated ?