Chernobyl Trivia Quiz: How Much Do You Really Know?

Trivia Quizzes History TV Shows

The safety test scheduled for Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl plant was meant to settle a narrow engineering question: whether a turbine coasting down after a power cut could keep coolant pumps turning long enough for the diesel generators to take over. It slipped through the day shift and was handed overnight to a crew who had not been briefed for it. At 1:23 on the morning of 26 April 1986, reactor power surged, fuel channels ruptured and the explosion lifted the shield off the core, throwing burning graphite across the surrounding roofs. The RBMK-1000 design used graphite as its moderator, so the fire that followed was the reactor consuming its own structure, and it burned in the open for days.

Valery Legasov, an inorganic chemist and first deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute, was attached to the government commission within a day of the explosion and spent much of the following two years on the response. He delivered the Soviet report to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in August 1986, a presentation that ran for hours and conceded more about the reactor's behaviour than the delegation had planned. He also recorded a set of tapes describing what he had seen and what he had left out. Legasov died by suicide on 27 April 1988, two years and one day after the test. Jared Harris plays him in the series.

Practical measures in the first weeks look improvised because they were. Helicopter crews flew over the open core dropping sand and boron by hand, thousands of tonnes of it, while their dosimeters registered numbers the equipment had not been built to display. Pripyat, a purpose built plant city of roughly fifty thousand residents, was evacuated on 27 April with an announcement that people would return in three days. Nobody did. When remote controlled machines failed in the radiation field on the reactor roof, soldiers were sent up in shifts timed in seconds to shovel graphite over the edge by hand.

The miniseries came from HBO and Sky as a five part co-production, written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, and it aired in May 2019. Production was based in Lithuania, where the Ignalina plant supplied real RBMK control rooms and turbine halls and a Soviet built housing district in Vilnius stood in for Pripyat. The composer Hildur Gudnadottir assembled the score from recordings made inside a decommissioned power station rather than from orchestral writing. Stellan Skarsgard plays Boris Shcherbina, the deputy prime minister who ran the commission, and Emily Watson plays Ulana Khomyuk, an invented composite standing in for the many scientists who worked on the cause. The series took ten Emmy Awards that year.

An exclusion zone of about thirty kilometres was drawn around the plant and has never been lifted. A concrete and steel sarcophagus was raised over the ruined building before the end of 1986, degraded over the following decades, and was covered in November 2016 by the New Safe Confinement, an arch slid into position over the whole structure on rails. Anatoly Dyatlov, the deputy chief engineer who oversaw the test, was sentenced with two plant managers in 1987. Official accounts put the immediate death toll at thirty-one, most of them firefighters and operators who developed acute radiation sickness in the following weeks, and the longer term figures remain contested. Answers to each question appear directly under the quiz.