Chernobyl at 40: the lies, the loss and why we can’t let go

By Kate Cantrell, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, University of Southern Queensland
Jessica Gildersleeve, Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland

Some historical events are so catastrophic they resist comprehension. And yet they compel us to try to understand them, again and again.

Chernobyl is one of them.

On April 26, 1986, at 1:23am, Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded, releasing a cloud of radioactive material that drifted across Europe and contaminated land inhabited by around five million people in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

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