Catholic University of Santiago de

Guayaquil
Faculty of Economic and
Administrative Sciences
International Business Management
Tutorial Project
CHERNOBYL DISASTER
English III A
Members :
Bjar Mara Cecilia
Castro Cindy
Jaramillo Kira
Teacher: Stuart Rivers

Chernobyl Disaster

Chernobyl is the name of the city situated in northern Ukraine, in the

southwest of Russia, in which there was a disaster and the most serious
accident in the history of the nuclear industry. This catastrophe occurred during
an experiment scheduled to test a potential emergency safety core cooling
feature, which took place during a normal shutdown procedure. The Soviet
reactor was designed with serious mistakes made by the plant operators. It is
extremely important to analyze: the crisis, what the citizens did and what we
can learn from this catastrophe.

The Chernobyl disaster occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl

Nuclear Power Plant in the city of Pripyat when operators ran a test on an
electric control system of unit 4. There was a sudden and unexpected power
surge, and when an emergency shutdown was attempted, a much larger spike
in power output occurred, which led to a reactor vessel rupture and a series of
steam explosions. The resulting fire sent a plume of highly radioactive fallout
into the atmosphere over an extensive geographical area. Thirty-one deaths are
directly attributed to the accident, all among the reactor staff and emergency
workers.

784,320 hectares of agricultural land were really affected which

caused restrictions on production. Also, the salary started to decrease and

unemployment tended to be higher in the damaged areas and this caused the
closure of many businesses.

Although Chernobyl had a lot of problems that caused so many negative

effects, they decided to react and do some things in order to solve them. Once
the catastrophe happened, rehabilitation actions were undertaken on a huge
scale.

To accommodate the resettled populations, large investments were

made in the construction of housing, schools, and hospitals, and also in

physical infrastructure, such as roads, water, and electricity supply and
sewerage. All the reactors in Chernobyl were permanently shut down. Each
affected country has provided some sort of pension and other social rights to
victims. The government adopted a very low threshold with regard to the level
of radioactive contamination that was considered acceptable for inhabited
areas; also they stimulated the development of agricultural and food-processing
techniques that reduced the radionuclide level in food.

In the absence of

alternative sources of incomes, government - provided Chernobyl benefits

became the key to survival for many whose livelihoods were wiped out by the
accident.

There are so many lessons we can learn from this catastrophe. For
example, we need to readjust the security terms and relocate all the citizens
that used to live in a disaster area. Another lesson we should definitely learn is
to be environmentally friendly while doing any type of dangerous experiments
and also, we should set up all the security processes properly in order to reduce
the possibility of having an accident.

As a country, we should be prepared in case of any emergency or

disaster by providing security in all the busy places and evacuation routes.
Also, the authorities should be trained in order to take good decisions in the
economic field like reducing inflation and the unemployment rate. No matter
how difficult a situation is, we should always learn from our mistakes and face
up to all the adversities in a responsible way.