Engineering time is a night; institutional time is thirty years of reports and a second shelter.
Health time is longer still and must be cited as models with dates, not as a single toll.
Timeline
- Construction begins
Work starts on the Chernobyl station beside the new town of Pripyat in the Ukrainian SSR.
- Unit 4 online
The fourth RBMK-1000 unit is commissioned. The design lacks a Western-style full containment building.
- Explosion at 01:23
The turbine-rundown test ends in a prompt power excursion, explosions and a graphite fire in unit 4.
- Pripyat evacuated
Buses empty the atomgrad. A wider 30-kilometre exclusion zone is drawn in the following days.
- Sweden detects the plume
Forsmark’s alarm and European monitoring force a first Soviet public statement.
- INSAG-1 in Vienna
IAEA’s first advisory report, based on limited data, stresses operator actions at the Post-Accident Review Meeting.
- Plant managers tried
Bryukhanov, Fomin and Dyatlov receive prison sentences after a public trial held in the Chernobyl area.
- INSAG-7 revises cause
The update names RBMK design and safety culture as principal causes and records hardware fixes at remaining units.
- Chernobyl Forum
UN agencies publish a synthesis on health, environment and social costs, including modelled death ranges that remain debated.
- New Safe Confinement
The arch is slid over the 1986 sarcophagus, the largest move of its kind, opening a long dismantling phase.
After 2016 the accident’s hardware is under a new roof; the health argument remains a dated literature, not a closed census.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.