Chernobyl disaster

Okay kiddo, so a long time ago, in 1986, there was an accident at a nuclear power plant in a place called Chernobyl, which is in a country called Ukraine.

Now, you know how in cartoons sometimes, the bad guys have a big control room with lots of buttons that they press to make things happen? Well, the people working in the Chernobyl power plant had a control room like that, but it was real and not a cartoon.

One day, they were doing an experiment in the control room to see what would happen if they turned off some safety features. Usually, those safety features would stop anything bad from happening, but they wanted to see what would happen if those safety features didn't work.

Unfortunately, things didn't go as planned. It caused a big explosion, and a lot of radiation got out. Now, remember how we've talked about how there are things called germs that can make us sick? Radiation is something like that, except it's not a germ, it's something invisible that can hurt people's bodies.

A lot of people who lived near there got sick from the radiation. Some of the people who were working there to try and fix the problem got very sick too, and some even died.

After the accident, people had to clean up the area because all the radiation was so bad that it was dangerous for people to live there. It's still not completely safe to go there today.

So, that's what happened with the Chernobyl disaster. It was a very serious and dangerous accident that happened because people were doing something very risky, and it caused a lot of harm.