40 years. The truth is still being carried.

Forty years ago, on 26 April 1986, reactor No. 4 at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant exploded.

The Chornobyl nuclear power plant was established in the 1970s, and located near the town of Pripyat, Kyiv district, in northern Ukraine. On 26 April 1986, technical damage to one of the four reactors in the nuclear power plant led to several small and one large explosion.

The radioactive fallout spread across Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Scandinavia, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Thousands were evacuated. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Entire communities lost their land, their homes, and the futures they had imagined.

This led to widespread contamination across much of Europe. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. Entire communities lost their land, their homes, and the futures they had imagined.

We recognise the people and places still carrying the burden of this disaster. The disaster did not end when the fires were extinguished. It did not end when the evacuation was declared complete.

“As a result of the explosion, the reactor was completely destroyed and the 1,000-tonne plate cover was ejected. The radioactive elements inside dispersed into the natural environment and formed a cloud. In the area of the accident, dozens of employees and volunteers lost their lives, hundreds were affected by radiation sickness, thousands of residents were evacuated, and hundreds of thousands were displaced from their homes. The radioactive cloud mainly affected large parts of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, as well as the Scandinavian countries and separate areas in Central and Eastern Europe.”

- Local Reflections on the Chernobyl Disaster 35 Years Later: Peripheral Narratives from Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and Bulgaria by Yelis Erolova and Yulia Tsyryapkina

The long shadow of radiological exposure that does not end with one generation.

For the communities who lived through Chornobyl, and for those born after it, the disaster is not history. It is a present, inherited reality.

There are ongoing difficulties for affected communities including intergenerational health issues. Thyroid cancers, cardiovascular disease, and immune system disorders continue to emerge across affected populations. Children and grandchildren of those exposed carry elevated risks that science is still working to fully understand.

Alongside the physical toll runs the psychological one: chronic stress, displacement trauma, the grief of severed land and community, these are losses that official casualty figures have never honestly accounted for.

This is something the Nuclear Truth Project has heard repeatedly from affected communities around the world, from Pacific nations, from Indigenous Peoples on whose land’s uranium was mined and weapons were tested, and from the communities living in Chornobyl's long shadow.

The pattern is consistent: communities bear the harm, while the truth is buried, delayed, or minimised.

Nuclear facilities must never become instruments or targets of war.

We also carry deep concern for what is happening at the Chornobyl site today. During the war between Russia and Ukraine, the exclusion zone has been militarily occupied, cooling and monitoring infrastructure disrupted, and radioactive materials placed in direct jeopardy. Nuclear safety authorities around the world have raised the alarm.

They are not strategic assets to be seized or leveraged, they are permanent repositories of radiological risk that, once destabilised, threaten not only the populations of warring nations but entire regions, ecosystems, and future generations who bear no part in the conflict.

To weaponize or endanger a nuclear site is a threat to all life including future generations who would become the unwilling inheritors of that choice.

Nuclear harm does not have an expiry date.

At the Nuclear Truth Project, we stand with all those still carrying the weight of this disaster. Their truth deserves to be told, and their rights, to health, to land, to remedy, deserve to be honoured.