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The cleanup operation after the accident assumed huge proportions. Up to 600,000 workers and military personnel were involved. |
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These so-called
"liquidators" carried out vital tasks just after the accident and took part in
cleanup work in the following year. Half of them were from the Ukraine, while the
remainder came from the whole of the former Soviet Union.
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There is scant information about these people. It is understood that up to 100,000 of them have died or been handicapped in the course of the fourteen years since the accident. A portion of these deaths can probably be attributed to the radiation they received in connection with the Chernobyl accident. |
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Those that received the largest radiation doses were in the first place the approximately 400 employees at the facility, and the fire crew and medical personnel that were there when the accident happened and in the following days. |
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“A couple of days later (after the day of catastrophe), we (specialists from the Nuclear Energy Institute of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences) were called into the Secrecy Department, and made to sign a 29-point document forbidding us to divulge secrets connected with the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant.”. Mikhail Byckau, Soviet nuclear physicist |
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