Chernobyl
51.2667°N 30.2167°E · Q129677
2 English words in this atlas trace back to Chernobyl. It sits in Ukraine.
The plant was not in Chernobyl, and the people who worked there did not live there either.
Reactor four exploded on 26 April 1986 at a station about fifteen kilometers from the old town of Chornobyl, which gave the plant its name. Its workers lived in Pripyat, a town built for them in 1970 and evacuated a day and a half after the explosion. The second sense of the phrase, meaning fear of the technology rather than injury from it, mirrors the older China syndrome.
A substance named after a place that was made by an accident at that place, in a single night in April 1986.
Crystals of this phase were first identified in 1989 in samples taken from room 217/2 of the destroyed Unit 4, the chamber that holds the Elephant's Foot. It formed when zirconium from fuel cladding reacted with uranium oxide and molten silicate building materials. The crystals are microscopic, and the yellow uranyl powders that later grew on the corium surface are a different set of minerals entirely.