Chernobyl disaster survivor reveals haunting vision after explosion – and shock at people today who don't know about the horrors

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

For decades, Sergei Belyakov had the same recurring nightmare. He was inside the Chernobyl Power Plant in Ukraine, soon after the explosion on 26 April 1986 that created the worst nuclear disaster in history. “I turned down a short corridor which seemed to be yellow everywhere – the floor, the walls, the windowsills,” he says. “Suddenly I realised the yellow colour was thousands of butterflies, all dead.”

Yet this haunting vision was not the conjuring of dark imagination but a sight he saw with his own eyes, little more than three months after Reactor Four at Chernobyl blew apart. Belyakov, then a 30-year-old university chemistry lecturer in Dnipropetrovsk, 390 miles south-east of the nuclear plant, was one of the thousands of Soviets drafted in to clean up the lethal radioactive waste – a necessary step before the giant reactor could be entombed in concrete to limit the further spread of radiation.

“It was on one of my first days that I saw the butterflies, perhaps 2,000 of them,” he says. “I never understood how they got there. It was absolutely surreal.”

His is one of many disparate stories in Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown, a four-part series to mark the 40th anniversary of the accident. Others include Igor Kirschenbaum, one of the few surviving workers of those who were inside the control room of Reactor Four when the accident happened, during a safety test.

“Given the command to start, I pushed the shutdown button to disconnect the generator from the grid,” recounts Kirschenbaum, then 28. “There was a terrible noise, thunder, dust falling from the ceiling, everything shook. A turbine operator said, ‘The ceiling has partially collapsed.’ I thought maybe he’d been hit on the head and was confused. He said, ‘I’m not crazy. You can see the stars.’ So I went and looked, and you really could.”

No one grasped that the reactor had been destroyed, but an evacuation began. Kirschenbaum got in an ambulance with injured colleagues, who started vomiting. “So the ambulance stopped to let them out, right opposite the destroyed reactor. There was a strange blue glow from it and we got out to see better, standing there amazed.” It was days before he realised there would be deaths from the disaster, “and that was a shock for me”.

By contrast, Belyakov’s knowledge of chemistry and radiation meant he always understood the seriousness of the accident. Even so, among thousands of men conscripted to help within the 30km exclusion zone created around Chernobyl, Belyakov was a volunteer.

“My wife was afraid for me. My son was eight at that time, but I wanted to help my country. I thought I would be collecting data in the exclusion zone, but I was assigned to manually clean up the radioactive material inside the station. It never crossed my mind to refuse.”

Thus, he joined the men who became known as “liquidators”. During his 40 days on site, Belyakov’s work included using a forklift truck to move radioactive material to a waste burial ground. But on six days he worked the most dangerous shift of all as a “bio-robot”, clearing nuclear rubble from the reactor roof using only a shovel. It was potentially so lethal that even in heavy protective lead gear, those working there were allowed on the roof for barely two minutes at a time.

Belyakov says, “Hundreds of us would queue for hours on 25 window-less flights of stairs. Then you arrive at the doorway to hell. I was psyched up, heart pumping. There was no time to think of being afraid. We wore industrial respirators with goggles which steamed up. It was like a torture chamber, but you had a job to do: run out, climb a couple of ladders, then dislodge the melted graphite with just a shovel.

“Afterwards I had a metallic taste in my mouth and couldn’t look at the sun. My nose was clogged. I was very physically fit at the time, and lost 20kg during my 40 days there. Back home I couldn’t walk 100 metres without holding a wall to catch my breath. I had problems with my kidneys and immune system, and we were told not to have more children in case our genes had been affected.

“Now I meet people who have never heard of Chernobyl, which is incredible to me. But I don’t think of myself as courageous for having volunteered. It was my duty. If not us, who?”

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Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown begins Sunday 19 April at 9pm on National Geographic.

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