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On April 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. Now, 25 years later, the current crisis in Fukushima is being called the “worst since Chernobyl.” Will we avoid another disaster? And further more, in another 25 years, how will we feel about nuclear energy?

Below a comprehensive article on Chernobyl by Philip R. Pryde, as it appears in The Oxford Companion to Global Change (Ed. David Cuff & Andrew Goudie). For further reading, I suggest looking to the newly published volume Nuclear Energy: What Everyone Needs to Know.

The most catastrophic accident ever to occur at a commercial nuclear power plant took place on April 26 , 1986, in northern Ukraine at Chernobyl (Chornobyl’ in Ukrainian). Intense radioactive fallout covered significant portions of several provinces in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Russian Federation, and lesser amounts fell out with precipitation in numerous other European countries. The resultant health and environmental consequences are ongoing, widespread, and serious.

The Chernobyl power station is one of several such complexes built in Ukraine. At the time, it was believed that nuclear energy would entail negligible damage to the environment. Four other large nuclear power complexes have been constructed and Ukraine has a major uranium-mining complex and numerous research facilities.

The Chernobyl reactors utilize a graphite-moderated type of nuclear reactor (Russian acronym, RBMK), with a normal output of 1,000 megawatts. These units are water-cooled and employ graphite rods to control core temperatures. Each reactor houses 1,661 fuel rods that contain mainly uranium-238 plus much smaller amounts of enriched uranium-235. There are several dangers inherent in the design of RBMK-1000 reactors, including the ability of the operators to disengage safety controls, the lack of a containment dome, and the possibility that, at very low power levels, a rapid and uncontrollable increase in heat can occur in the reactor’s core and may result in a catastrophic explosion ( Haynes and Bojcun , 1988 , pp. 2–4).

This was what happened early in the morning of April 26 , 1986. A series of violations of normal safety procedures, committed during a low-power experiment being run on reactor number 4, resulted in a thermal explosion and fire that destroyed the reactor building, exposed the core, and vented vast amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere. Pieces of the power plant itself were found up to several kilometers from the site of the explosion.

This radiation continued to be released into the atmosphere over a period of nine days, with the prevailing winds carrying the radioactive material initially in a northwesterly direction over northern Europe. The winds later shifted to the northeast, carrying fallout southwestward into central Europe and the Balkan peninsula. The overall result was significant radioactive fallout (mainly associated with rainfall) in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Germany (mainly Bavaria), the United Kingdom, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and Switzerland. Lower levels of radioactive deposition were reported in Denmark, France, the Benelux countries, Greece, Ireland, Norway, Yugoslavia, and several other European nations (Medvedev 1990 , chap. 6). The republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were also directly in the path of the initial plume.

In the Soviet Union, the regions that received the highest levels of radioactive contamination were in the northern Ki

John Mueller is the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies and Professor of Political Science, Ohio State University.  His new book, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima To Al-Qaeda, argues that nuclear weapons have had little impact on history.  Although they have inspired overwrought policies and distorted spending priorities, things generally would have turned out much the same if they had never been invented.   In the original post below Mueller looks at why formal nuclear arms reduction agreements are unnecessary.

The popular notion that the path to nuclear arms reduction requires formal agreements of the sort recently signed by the United States and Russia needs reexamination. Instead of fabricating elaborate agreements about reducing arms, they should just to do it.

The cold war arms buildup, after all, was not accomplished through written agreement; instead, there was a sort of free market in which each side, keeping a wary eye on the other, sought security by purchasing varying amounts of weapons and troops. As requirements and perspectives changed, so did the force structure of each side.

The same process can work in reverse: as tensions decline, so can the arms that are their consequence. Reductions are more difficult when accomplished by formal treaties requiring that an exquisitely nuanced agreement must be worked out for every abandoned nut and bolt. A negative arms race is likely to be as chaotic, halting, ambiguous, self interested, and potentially reversible as a positive one, but arms reduction will proceed most expeditiously if each side feels free to reverse any reduction it later comes to regret.

Although the signing of formal disarmament agreements can have a useful atmospheric effect, the process itself tends to delay and clutter the process. The current agreement, for example, was slowed by the Russian effort to tie it into efforts to have the United States abandon missile defenses. The Russians held on to weapons they were apparently quite willing to give up only because the weapons could be used as bargaining chips in arms reduction negotiations. That is, there were more weapons around because a formal arms control negotiating apparatus existed.

With the demise of fears of another major war, many of the arms that struck such deep fear for so long are quietly being allowed—as the bumper sticker would have it—to rust in peace. Let it happen.