The Chernobyl Disaster Quiz

Ten questions on the worst nuclear disaster in history, from the night the reactor exploded to the steel arch that covers it today. Each answer comes with a story worth repeating.

10 questions
About 3 minutes
Medium

The New Safe Confinement, a large steel arch, over reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant — Tim Porter, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

About this quiz

On April 26, 1986, reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded in the middle of the night. The blast and the fire that followed spread radioactive material across Europe and emptied a city of about 50,000 people for good. The cleanup took years and hundreds of thousands of workers. Ukraine today spells the name Chornobyl.

The quiz covers what the operators were doing that night, the abandoned city of Pripyat, the men who went into the wreckage, what became of the exclusion zone, and the giant steel arch built over the ruined reactor.

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