Chernobyl Victims Remembered on Nuclear Disaster Anniversary

April 26, 2005

KIEV - Hundreds of people took part in religious services in Ukraine to commemorate the victims of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which spread radioactive contamination across a wide path of Europe and led to the premature death of tens of thousands of people.

An overnight service was held in the village of Slavutich near the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine, which closed in December 2000 but still poses a threat due to the 200 tonnes of radioactive magma buried under the fractured cover of its number four reactor.

In Kiev hundreds of people, some of them former Chernobyl employees, that were sent in to "clean up" after the disaster, placed flowers on the memorials to the dead.

President Viktor Yushchenko, participated in a morning ceremony in Kiev placing flowers on the memorial and lighting candles.

The disaster occurred on April 26, 1986, at 01:23 am, when the core of Chernobyl's number four reactor exploded, spewing out radioactive elements into the atmosphere, equivalent to 200 Hiroshima nuclear bombs. The radioactive cloud spread across Ukraine, Belarus, Scandinavia and western Europe.

Officially 31 people died in the accident, shortly after the explosion. However, since 1986, more than 25,000 civilian and military personnel from Russia and Belarus, who fought the radioactive blaze and built a concrete cover for the damaged reactor, have died.

Some 600,000 of these so-called "liquidators" worked on the disaster site between 1986 and 1990, in addition to the 130,000 people who were evacuated from the contaminated zone in the days which followed the accident.

An estimated 2.4 million Ukrainians, including 428,000 children, suffer a range of health problems linked to their radioactive exposure during the disaster, according to the Ukrainian health ministry.