On April 26th, 1986, the infamous Chernobyl nuclear disaster began at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the city of Pripyat, Ukraine, at the Belarus border. It began when the No. 4 reactor at the power plant exploded. It is one of only two Nuclear accidents to be rated at maximum severity on the International Nuclear Event Scale, with the other being the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011. The response involved more than 500,000 people, and an estimated $68 billion (18 billion Rubles), and remains the worst nulcear disaster in history, as well as the costliest disaster in human history, with an estimated cost of $700 billion USD.
