The Elephants Foot

Every once in a while, idly sitting in front of the computer, refreshing my political blogs every thirty seconds or so waiting for a congressman to get caught blowing a donkey or abusing infants, I will stare at a blank google screen and think to myself "what do I want to know more about" and I will search my mind for fragments of something that once caught my interest but had gone unresearched. I have rarely regretted idle curiosity as much as I did the day I remembered something I had seen on PBS ages ago, maybe in the late 80's.
"Elephants Foot" I typed. and some nasty-assed truth got vomited onto my computer by the internet.
Ask a bizarre question, get a bizarre answer.
My History teacher, Bill Forstchen, had taken a class of kids to the Soviet Union. I had been expelled the year before, but most of my friends were on that trip. Chernobyl blew up while they were there. None of them (as far as I know) were effected, as they didnt go to the Ukraine or Kiev. It was national news that affected me personally (via my friends) so I payed casual attention. So, when, years later, I saw that a documentary was scheduled about it, I watched.
The entire premise of the documentary was calming. There were scientists working in the same building as the reactor that exploded, and a thousand people worked every day in the three other reactors in the same complex. It MUST have been a minor accident that had been resolved, except for this particular area in one building, to have all those people working there. Some scientists had located most of the nuclear fuel, absorbed into melted sand (dropped by helocopters in the first days of the crisis) and formed a glass mass which had dripped through cracks in the concrete containment and pooled and cooled in the rooms underneath the reactor. The Scientists dubbed the mass, when they found it, "the elephant's foot" for it's shape.
I (mistakenly) downloaded a film called "The Battle of Chernobyl" and watched it.
There are some things it is better not to know.
If you are really into being VERY depressed about something over which you have no control, watch this film.

More than 500,000 people got doses of radiation that would, in the west, be considered hazardous. And these are only the workers that were used (mostly red army, but also miners and steelworkers were drafted) to clean it up. No study has been done of "civilians" evacuated from the area that may number from 10,000 (the residents of Pripyat, the employee's town and Chernobyl itself and the surrounding countryside) to several million (the Soviet government, usually drowned in red tape and paperwork, kept very spotty records about this event)
About 500 helicopter pilots were redirected from Afghanistan (where they were fighting a war with Osama Bin Laden, among others) to Chernobyl, and ALL of them died. Gorbachev blames Chernobyl for the Soviet's withdrawal from Afghanistan. He also credits Chernobyl for the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, holding the position that because of Chernobyl, the Soviet Union had neither the money nor the manpower to keep up with the West. He is probably right.

Here is the real information, tho. They were very close to a meltdown to groundwater, which would have caused an explosion powerful enough to vaporize the three other reactors on the site, which would have combined to form the largest "dirty bomb" imaginable, which would have rendered the Ukraine and Belorussia uninhabitable for 250,000 years. They averted it by tunneling under the reactor and laying a 30-foot thick concrete disk under it, at the cost of hundreds of lives, and the health of thousands more.
The government allowed the Mayday celebrations in Kiev to go forward, despite knowing that radioactive dust was settling on all the participants, turning Kiev into a place that had radiation levels so high that in the west, people wouldn't have been allowed anywhere near without protective clothing.
It is stunning what damage a government can do to it's people just by being in stubborn denial for a few days.