This article is written in British English with Oxford spelling (colour, realize, organization, analyse; note that -ize is used instead of -ise) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

Chernobyl disaster is a former featured article candidate. Please view the links under Article milestones below to see why the nomination failed. For older candidates, please check the archive.

Article milestones Date Process Result March 8, 2006 Good article nominee Listed May 7, 2006 Good article reassessment Delisted January 3, 2009 Featured article candidate Not promoted February 14, 2013 Good article nominee Not listed Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on April 26, 2004, April 26, 2005, April 26, 2006, April 26, 2007, April 26, 2009, April 26, 2012, April 26, 2013, and April 26, 2016. Current status: Former featured article candidate

Bridge of Death (Prypiat) was nominated for deletion. The discussion was closed on 27 March 2009 with a consensus to merge. Its contents were merged into Chernobyl disaster. The original page is now a redirect to this page. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected article, please see its history; for its talk page, see here.

This  level-4 vital article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects.

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Text and/or other creative content from this version of Chernobyl after the disaster was copied or moved into Chernobyl disaster with this edit on 03 May 2012. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted so long as the latter page exists.

This article has been viewed enough times to make it onto the all-time Top 100 list. It has had 81 million views since December 2007.

This article has been viewed enough times in a single year to make it into the Top 50 Report annual list. This happened in 2019, when it received 25,571,308 views.

This article has been viewed enough times in a single week to appear in the Top 25 Report 7 times. The weeks in which this happened: September 7 to 13, 2014 April 24 to 30, 2016 May 19 to 25, 2019 May 26 to June 1, 2019 June 2 to 8, 2019 June 9 to 15, 2019 June 16 to 22, 2019

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Archives

March 2004 – 18 August 2005 Previous page name discussions, 18 August 2005 – 15 December 2005 19 December 2005 – 20 April 2006 20 April 2006 – 6 August 2006 August 2006 – December 2007 December 2007 – December 2008 2009 2010-2011 2012

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The fist sentence should read: "At the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the city of Pripyat, located in the then Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union (USSR)" instead of: "at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the city of Pripyat, then located in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union (USSR)". It did not physically move.

The section titled "Social Economic Effects" should be renamed to "socioeconomic effects" to reflect proper terminology.

minor but this is the English language page "Numerous structural and construction quality issues, as well as deviations from the original plant design, had been known to KGB since at least 1973 and passed on to the Central Committee, which take no action and classified the information." should be "been known to the KGB... which took no action"

The timeline says all fires were contained at 6:35 - this should probably mention "fires around the power plant": The core continued to burn days after, but there is no description what measures really lead to containing the fire inside the reactor. It just says "It is now known that virtually none of the neutron absorbers reached the core." It is not clear what really stopped the fire.

decay heat was the "fire" and it "stopped" being "red hot" like decay heat always does. With time.

There's a rather extended high-comma-count "sentence" with what looks to be a misspelling.

The expected highest body activity was in the first few years, were the unabated ingestion of local food, primarily milk consumption, resulted in the transfer of activity from soil to body, after the dissolution of the USSR, the now reduced scale initiative to monitor the human body activity in these regions of Ukraine, recorded a small and gradual half-decadal-long rise, in internal committed dose, before returning to the previous trend of observing ever lower body counts each year.

minimal-change improvement:

The expected highest body activity was in the first few years, where the unabated ingestion of local food (primarily milk) resulted in the transfer of activity from soil to body. After the dissolution of the USSR, the now reduced scale initiative to monitor the human body activity in these regions of Ukraine recorded a small and gradual half-decadal-long rise in internal committed dose before returning to the previous trend of observing ever lower body counts each year.

This has come up before, see..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Chernobyl_disaster/Archive_13#Lead_too_long

Dougsim

The "Human impact" section does not need to be nearly as long as it is considering Effects of the Chernobyl disaster already exists and has much of this information in it and is linked multiple times as further reading. Cutting that down would help this article a lot - there may be justification to move other big sections of this article into their own articles, particularly "Investigations and the evolutions of identified causes" (which could be combined with "Fizzled nuclear explosion hypothesis). Reconrabbit (talk) 16:54, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I agree, so long the destination article contains the same information and sources.Sredmash (talk) 22:32, 9 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Volume or Mass of Uranium ratio to Metal/Steel Container used, what were the Mass/Volume of Titanium/Platinum used per Mass/Volume of Uranium activated.?? 103.224.95.4 (talk) 19:37, 10 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The third paragraph under Core meltdown risk mitigation introduces Alexei Ananenko. However, the next paragraph refers to him as "Alexy" Ananenko. Then, citation 80 says its "Alexey." Should they be changed for consistency? ~tayanaru (talk) 21:58, 29 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I would vote for AlexeiSredmash (talk) 23:29, 29 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Recent sources on his own article refer to him as Oleksiy, why not use that name instead? Reconrabbit 00:15, 30 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

thats a good idea ~tayanaru (talk) 21:32, 1 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Amazing writing 64.185.43.184 (talk) 03:12, 20 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Given the size of this article and the difficulty in effectively merging the "effects" section into that article, which has its own issues, I propose that the "investigations sections" be split off into their own article, similar to Investigations into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Reconrabbit 19:33, 30 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

• Support not sure if you're still interested in doing the split yourself @Reconrabbit: but if you are, I'd recommend just doing the split now without waiting for additional comments here. Cheers, Dan the Animator 05:17, 20 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  I'll take action on it then. Reconrabbit 05:43, 20 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  Done: Investigations into the Chernobyl disaster I've never done a split before but this one was pretty clean. Let me know if I screwed anything up. Worth noting that this article is now at 18,000 words - we're getting there but it's still huge. Reconrabbit 18:18, 20 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  Thanks for doing the split, it look perfect! :) Great job with writing the lead for the new article too! My only suggestion would be, if possible, to split additional content from the article (not necessarily to the investigations article but in general) given it still is well above the recommended 9,000-10,000 readable prose word limit. That said, I'm not an expert on the subject matter but after taking a cursory look through the article, I think it might be advisable to split off most of the content under the Human impact section (especially the Abortions and Cancer assessments parts, which are disproportionately long in comparison to the other subsections). Dan the Animator 21:33, 20 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  Also thought I'd put this out there but I'd be happy to help bring this article through WP:GAN if you want. Cheers, Dan the Animator 21:38, 20 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  Thank you for the offer. I believe all that needs to be done to bring the word count down is to move more of the "effects" into Effects of the Chernobyl disaster, which is weirdly divided between these articles. I'm not intimately familiar with the text right now, but by the time I'm finished with that I probably will be ready for a nomination. Reconrabbit 22:09, 20 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  Sounds good and agree with merging content into the Effects article. No rush with editing the article and feel free to nominate whenever you're ready. When you do nominate it though, make sure to ping/message me if you want me as the reviewer since I'll probably forget about this in the meantime. In any case, thanks for taking the time to work on this article! :) Dan the Animator 00:04, 21 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]