"We were all lined up and told, 'who doesn't want to go on the roof, step forward'. Once they'd walked through the door, no-one was allowed to leave.The men's passports were seized before they were loaded onto buses and taken to a forest, where they were told to slip into brand new army uniforms. "There was very little information about the disaster and all the official sources kept reassuring us, 'it's just a minor accident, nothing to worry about'. They had initially feared they would be sent to fight in the USSR's bloody war in Afghanistan. This man knows what it's really like shovelling radioactive debris on top of Chernobyl's reactor. "When they told us, 'You have to go to the roof', we thought, 'Oh, this means we can go home soon'," he says.On the day, he changed his army uniform for a protective suit, glasses and a gas mask, and a metal groin guard. The only graphite moderator damage was found to be localized around burning fuel elements.In the Chernobyl disaster the graphite was a contributing factor to the cause of the accident. Whether they want to or not. "This service may include material from Agence France-Presse (AFP), APTN, Reuters, AAP, CNN and the BBC World Service which is copyright and cannot be reproduced. "The radiation had returned, if not to say it was worse. The respirators the men were given wouldn't stay on because of the heat and were used until they got holes in them.Later they found they should have been replaced every day.Despite their growing fears, the men were reluctant to confide in each other. He is 65 years old now and retired.When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, he helped establish the Estonian Taxation Office.The same year, he was sent to a hospital in Hiroshima, the Japanese city hit by a nuclear bomb at the end of World War II, where he was checked for radiation.While he was found to be healthy, he has since been pained to see many of the men he served with in Chernobyl die.A staggering one-third of the men of his town who went to Chernobyl have died.
But now a team of researchers has concluded otherwise. The reactor itself is made of graphite, graphite rod in the channel is equal to no channel. You get an order, you go, and you do it. "But one time, someone had an idea that we should return to a village that was hosed down a couple of days earlier and check the radiation levels again. "Sometimes I think that maybe we didn't even want to talk about it or think about it," Jaan says.Then, a shimmer of hope emerged — in the unlikeliest of situations.A rumour had it that the very last leg of the assignment was going on the roof of the reactor to clean up as much debris as possible.Humans were going to be given a task that remote-control robots had previously attempted, but failed. "There was no mass rejection. 1 $\begingroup$ Well it turned out to be the final straw that catalysed the disaster, so it was a huge problem at the end. "The Chernobyl explosion that had happened just days before didn't even cross my mind. There have been suicides too, but thankfully not too many. But not too long ago it was around 10 men a year," he says. By the next evening, they were setting up camp on the edge of They were just 30 kilometres away from the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster — the still-smouldering wreckage of a reactor torn apart by a series of explosions and spewing radiation in a plume across Europe.Jaan was among the first group sent to clean up in the aftermath of the catastrophe.Tasked with hosing down radiation on the houses in nearby villages, he was thrown into the thick of it. At the time, investigation and analysis concluded that a steam explosion was the cause, and that's been the accepted explanation ever since. Die Wärmeabfuhr kann entweder durch Gas oder durch Wasser erfolgen. The town [of Pripyat] has overgrown with trees," he says.But he hopes tourists won't start flocking to the ghost city. "We started to have doubts. The machines simply stopped working due to the unprecedented levels of radiation.
There are little bits and pieces in the immediate vicinity of the damaged unit. "I didn't even think about what will happen to me. There are also bigger pieces that have found their way into some interesting places. "Despite the apparent uselessness of the job, they continued to work 11-hour days without a day off until the end of June. After that, they had two days of downtime a month. The Chernobyl plant was a High Power Channel-type Reactor (RBMK) that used water to both cool the core and generate steam for its reactions Crucially, most of Chernobyl…