On the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, POWER sent a freelance photographer and correspondent to the site in Ukraine to document the massive decommissioning effort still underway—and the new threats that have complicated it.
At 1:23 a.m. local time on April 26, 1986, a sudden and uncontrollable power surge destroyed Unit 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located about 130 kilometers (km, 81 miles) north of Kyiv and just 20 km (12.5 miles) south of the Belarusian border. The explosion—followed by fires that burned for 10 days—released up to 5% of the radioactive reactor core into the atmosphere, scattering contamination across Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and much of Europe. It remains the only accident in the history of commercial nuclear power reactors where radiation-related fatalities occurred, and its consequences—human, environmental, political, and technical—continue to reverberate four decades later.
The 40th anniversary arrives at a moment when the Chernobyl site is anything but a static memorial. Decommissioning of the plant’s three undamaged reactors is underway. A massive dry spent fuel storage facility—the largest of its kind in the world—is in the midst of a multi-year fuel transfer campaign. And the New Safe Confinement (NSC, Figure 1), the enormous arch-shaped structure that took more than a decade to design and build, sustained significant damage from a drone strike in February 2025, raising urgent questions about the long-term security of the site in a country still at war.
Read more about the history, all the efforts still underway, and new life in the Exclusion Zone: Chernobyl at 40: The World’s Worst Nuclear Power Accident and Where It Stands Now