Nuclear Fears Hang Heavy Over Ukraine on Chernobyl Anniversary
Shaun Burnie is well-acquainted with the mangled bones of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine.
A longtime nuclear expert with environmental non-profit Greenpeace’s Ukraine team, he’s stared at the concrete sarcophagus piled on top of the ruins of the destroyed Reactor 4 three times in the last 18 months alone.
The radiation levels in the space are up to 1,000 times higher than what the average person experiences daily. Without protective gear, this is a lethal dose.
But no matter how many times it comes into view, Burnie says, “it’s beyond comprehension.” The material languishing in Chernobyl will be dangerous for tens of thousands of years-or as Burnie puts it, pretty much “the rest of time.”
Sunday marks 40 years since the world’s worst nuclear disaster, the catastrophe still an open wound for a country more than four years into a brutal war with Russia that has kept nuclear power plants on the front line and in danger of being hit.
With one of its major nuclear power plants in Russian hands, and the others bearing the brunt of persistent attacks on Ukrainian substations, the country most scarred by Chernobyl is also one of the most dependent on nuclear power plants.
And the fears of another nuclear disaster aren’t going away. The war in Ukraine has had “severe consequences for nuclear safety and security in Ukraine,” and directly threatens people not just in Ukraine, but throughout Europe, United Nations experts warned on Thursday.
The 1986 Disaster
On April 26, 1986, during an ill-fated safety test, the reactor lost power, causing the test team to withdraw most of the control rods, which are supposed to slow down the reactor.
The reaction accelerated out of control after the team attempted to reinsert the control rods, the reactor overheating and the nuclear fuel becoming exposed to cooling water that quickly turned into out-of-control steam pressure.
Two people were immediately killed in explosions that blew 200 tons of concrete and burning nuclear fuel from the top of the reactor building, showering down and starting massive fires across the facility.
Plumes of radioactive material blew west and northwest, paying no attention to national borders. Sensors ignited across Europe, and farms as far away as Scotland would come to have restrictions placed on them for decades as the heavy rainfall in the days after the disaster embedding radioactivity into the earth and the bellies of livestock.
Over the next few days, radioactive iodine was one of the most pressing problems. Radioactive iodine is absorbed by the thyroid, and although exact numbers of people affected by the accident are unknown, there was a marked increased in thyroid cancer diagnoses in the years after the disaster in Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Russia.
Radioactivity continued to be released into the environment for many months. The death toll is still debated, but one 2022 assessment from the National Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine recognized 41,000 fatalities. Others placed the death toll anywhere between 4,000 and 30,000.
The devastation was later blamed on poorly designed reactors and neglect at the plant, but the fallout powered anti-nuclear movements in Europe and spurred on investment in renewable power sources like solar instead.
The last reactor at Chernobyl was still generating vital electricity for Ukraine until the year 2000, despite international pressure to shut the site down entirely.
When experts return to Chernobyl now, they typically stay in the town from which the power plant takes its name. They get glimpses of Pripyat, the once-bustling, purpose-built settlement just two miles from the power plant which trees and plants have reclaimed, radioactive cesium imbued in their trunks and branches.
Wildlife now roams the deserted streets and parks, the full implications of the lingering radioactivity on their bodies still a mystery. Cranes brought in to work on the never-finished fifth and sixth reactors still loom over the entrance to the plant like “skeletons,” Burnie said.
Reactor Shield Damaged in War
Construction started on a massive steel and concrete structure to contain the corpse of the reactor shortly after the disaster. In little over 200 days between May and November 1986, what is known as the sarcophagus was pieced together around the reactor to trap radioactive material inside.
But it was never meant to last. A European-funded replacement, dubbed the New Safe Confinement (NSC), was built at a cost of roughly $2 billion and finally handed over to Ukraine in 2019.
The NSC is taller than the Statue of Liberty and was built to trap radiation for a century.
But in February 2025, a few years into the war, a Russian explosive drone struck and damaged the protective shelter, according to Ukraine.
A fire at the site in northern Ukraine was quickly extinguished, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said at the time, while Russia denied targeting Chernobyl.
But the damage was done. The NSC no longer effectively stops radiation leaking out, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in December.
A new report from Greenpeace, released last week, said the drone attack had most likely shortened the 100-year life span of the NSC and persistent Russian attacks “make it impossible to repair the damage in the near term.”
Fixing it is a logistical nightmare Ukraine is struggling to wake from, and is likely to cost at least tens of millions of dollars.
Nuclear experts have, so far, not even been able to fully assess the damage to the NSC, although about half of the material inside the roof space of the NSC was burned, Burnie said.
Nuclear workers can be exposed to 20 times the radiation the everyday person encounters each year. But while trying to mend the NSC, they could reach this threshold in just 12 hours, Burnie said.
It’s not the only impact of the war. Greenpeace says thousands of Russian soldiers surged into the 30 kilometer exclusion zone and right up to the plant as troops poured over the Belarusian border into Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Chernobyl is only around ten miles from the Belarusian border.
Footage captured by Ukrainian authorities shows convoys of Russian vehicles milling into the irradiated area more than four years ago. Russian troops camped out at Chernobyl for more than a month, Burnie said, with satellite imagery indicating camps close to highly irradiated areas of the complex.
“The soldiers really were completely ignorant of the radiation issues,” Burnie said.
The Russian troops used the wooded areas around Chernobyl to launch weapons from multiple-launch rocket systems, starting fires among the radioactive trees and underbrush by accident in an area now littered with landmines, Burnie said. Those fighting forest fires near Chernobyl risk inhaling radioactive particles.
Although the Russian soldiers left Chernobyl within weeks of its initial invasion, the site is still exposed to the brunt of war ravaging Ukraine. Russian airstrikes on Kyiv, or on western Ukraine, still travel over the Chernobyl area.
“There’s a huge military dimension to this,” Burnie said.
This sentiment rings true for Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, too. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine was quickly seized by Russia after taking the town of Enerhodar in March 2022, although Ukrainian operators continued to work at the site. Reports quickly emerged of violence directed at Ukrainian staff from Russian troops.
There’s far more radioactive material at Zaporizhzhia than there was at Chernobyl, Burnie said.
The Zaporizhzhia plant has been repeatedly disconnected from external power over the course of the war. The six-reactor site is not currently operational but needs access to off-site power to keep it safe.
Two power lines, one more powerful than the other, keep electricity flowing to the nuclear plant. The facility lost power earlier twice this month, meaning it has been disconnected from off-site power 14 times since February 2022.
The main off-site power line has been disconnected for more than a month, forcing the plant to rely on a backup.
“Each instance of loss of external power imposes thermal and operational stress on safety systems, increasing the chance that at some point the on-site backup systems will not perform as designed,” Vitaly Fedchenko, a senior researcher with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)’s weapons of mass destruction program, previously told Newsweek.
“Each loss of external power and the need to rely on diesel generators should be seen as a safety risk and a near-miss.”
The Need for Nuclear
Ukraine has long been one of the top consumers of nuclear-generated electricity, which is the main product of civilian nuclear reactors.
But Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, like its thermal plants, have forced the country to rely on its three remaining working nuclear power plants.
Greenpeace says Russia has attacked the electrical substations linking up to all three nuclear plants, which provide vital electricity for Ukraine’s population and ensure the nuclear cores don’t go into meltdown.
Because of Russian bombardment, Ukraine now leans on its nuclear power plants for at least 70 percent of all its electricity, the country’s state-owned nuclear operator, Energoatom told Reuters.
This is roughly equal to France, which is the world’s largest electricity exporter and has 57 reactors in use. Ukraine has nine operational reactors.
Ukraine still feels Chernobyl’s legacy strongly today, and doubled down on nuclear safety controls because of it, said William Alberque, a former head of NATO’s nuclear non-proliferation center. Russia’s temporary seizure of Chernobyl, and current grip on Zaporizhzhia, has “retraumatized” Ukraine, he told Newsweek.
But with no ceasefire deal on the horizon, it’s hard to see how any fears of another nuclear disaster like Chernobyl happening again can be soothed.
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This story was originally published April 26, 2026 at 5:00 AM.