“The ultimate test of a man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.”                                                           Gaylord Nelson

April 26, 1986, 1:23 a.m. – Pripyat, Russia: Operators at the Chernobyl nuclear plant near the small town of Pripyat were performing their usual Saturday night testing of the plant’s generators when something went terribly wrong. Two explosions took out the No. 4 reactor, releasing 400 times as much radiation into the atmosphere as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, did in 1945.

For a week, firefighters and plant personnel worked to stabilize the situation. Several hundred tons of sand and fire-retardant material were dropped into the reactor to smother the bed. However, 10 days after the explosion, engineers discovered that the reactor core, containing roughly 185 tons of radioactive material, was still melting down and slowly burning its way through the thick concrete floor. The situation was critical.

If the molten smelt burned through the slab and reached a five-million-gallon cooling water tank in the basement, it would cause an explosion that would take out the other three reactors. Experts estimated such an event would flatten the area for 100 square miles, making it uninhabitable for hundreds of years. As many as 30 million people were at risk.

The large tank needed to be drained quickly by opening two manual valves in the partially flooded basement. The valves were located 10 feet beneath the reactor core in a highly radioactive area. The only solution was to have a team suit up, enter the basement, and manually open the valves.

Plant authorities feared this could be a suicide mission. As they stood in the control room solemnly discussing who should be on the suicide squad, three men stepped forward. Oleksiy Ananenko, Valery Bespalov, and Boris Baranov, fully aware of the risk, volunteered to don wet suits, take a searchlight, and open the valves. Plant management, moved by the men’s selflessness and courage, promised the trio that if anything happened to them, their families would be cared for.

Ananenko, a senior engineer, knew roughly where the valves were located. The men entered the dark, contaminated basement, wading through water and groping along the pipes, which led them to the large gate valves. After opening the valves, they quickly returned to the control room to the cheers of fellow employees. It took 24 hours to drain the tank and avert a cataclysmic event.

The Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster remains the worst in history. Immediately following the reactor explosion, 129 plant personnel were transported to a Moscow hospital in grave condition. During the next month, more than 18,000 people were hospitalized. The initial evacuation zone radius was about six miles. It would be expanded to 20 miles a few weeks later. Pregnant women and children were moved 50 miles from the plant due to dangerous radiation levels.

By Christmas, more than 100,000 people from small towns and villages within 250 miles of the facility had been relocated. In 1987, 200,000 more people were relocated in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. Almost 40 years after the Chernobyl incident, no one knows the actual death toll or financial costs. Scientists estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have died prematurely due to radiation-induced cancers.

As devastating as the disaster was, it could have been a nuclear armageddon had three men not volunteered to risk everything to drain the cooling tank. Although medical authorities anticipated the three heroes would die in a matter of weeks, they didn’t.

All three men survived and lived normal lives – a fact almost as remarkable as their courage on May 6, 1986. Boris Baranov, a mechanical engineer, died of a heart attack in 2005 at age 65. Valery Bespalov, age 67, is retired and lives in Kyiv, Ukraine. Alexei Ananenko, age 65, still works in the nuclear industry in Ukraine. Regarding their treatment as heroes, he expresses the sentiment of the group, “I knew where the valves were located. We never considered ourselves heroes. We were doing our job.”