In the aftermath of the explosion, Bryukhanov was made a scapegoat and he and five other defendants were sentenced to ten years hard labour at a penal colony in Donetsk in was described as 'one of the last show trials' of the communist era.
The blast, which emitted more than 400 times the amount of radiation into the atmosphere than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, occurred during a safety test and saw Soviet authorities take 36 hours to launch a full-scale evacuation.Īt least 31 workers died in the days after the accident, although the long-term impact of the radiation was harder to quantify - and at least 350,000 people were evacuated out of the area in the months following the disaster. Viktor Bryukhanov was the manager of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Pripyat, northern Ukraine, when an explosion at reactor four spewed radiation over the region, including parts of Belarus and Europe, in April 1986. The head of the Chernobyl power plant who was sentenced to ten years at a labour camp for his part in the nuclear disaster has died at the age of 85.
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