What was the name of the nuclear power plant in the USSR which had a deadly accident in 1986?

On April 26, 1986, the world witnessed the most severe accident in the history of nuclear power generation. The disaster occurred at Unit 4 of a nuclear power station near Pripyat, in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. A combination of a flawed Soviet reactor design and serious errors by plant operators during a safety test led to a catastrophic power surge. This resulted in a series of massive explosions that blew the 1,000-ton roof off the reactor, releasing 400 times more radiation than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and exposing the reactor's core to the atmosphere.

The explosions and subsequent fire sent a plume of highly radioactive fallout across large parts of the western Soviet Union and Europe. In the immediate aftermath, two workers were killed in the explosions, and 28 more died from acute radiation sickness within months. The nearby city of Pripyat, built to house the plant's workers and their families, was evacuated 36 hours after the accident, its 50,000 residents forced to leave their homes forever.

In the weeks and years that followed, a massive cleanup operation took place, and a large exclusion zone was established, initially with a radius of 30 kilometers (18 miles). The Soviet government evacuated about 115,000 people from the most contaminated areas in 1986, with another 220,000 resettled later. The disaster had significant long-term health consequences, including a substantial increase in thyroid cancer among those who were children at the time of the accident. The site remains a stark reminder of the potential dangers of nuclear energy.