See the light
My Geiger counter leaps from zero to .003 in a heartbeat. “It’s OK!” our guide, Helen, assures me. “This is a very low level of radiation!”The Geiger counters are handed out to the members of my tour and activated one by one. Helen assures us of the low radiation levels and explains that these counters, which hang around our necks, will beep as we approach radiation hotspots emitting higher-than-average levels.
On 26 April 1986, Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located near the town of Pripyat in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), exploded as a result of a flawed safety test. The resulting open-air reactor core fire released radioactive contamination into the atmosphere that spread over the then-USSR and Western Europe.
The catastrophic event, one of only two nuclear disasters rated at seven (the highest level) on the International Nuclear Event Scale (the other was the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011) resulted in the mass evacuation
