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Chernobyl
On April 26th 1986, Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear power facility at
Pripyat, Ukraine, exploded. The explosion and fire that followed launched
a plume of radioactive material hundreds of times larger than an atomic bomb
into the atmosphere. Most of this fell on Belarus and Ukraine, but some
fell as far north as the British Isles and Scandinavia.
A quarter of the farming land in Belarus will be contaminated with strontium and caesium isotopes for hundreds of years, with some areas where plutonium contamination is high expected to be unusable for thousands of years.
In southern Belarus thyroid cancer in children has increased by more than 100 times, due to the large amounts of radioactive iodine they have ingested, and there have been rises in many other types of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, respiratory problems, ailments of the digestive system and birth defects.