How did Americans experience the nuclear incident in Chernobyl in 1986, and what did early news coverage of it look like?

29 comments

1. Remember it was not known publicly for some time after it happened. Excess radiation was detected at a nuclear power plant in Sweden a day and a half after the Chernobyl reactor exploded, and traced to *outside* the plant. The Soviets only announced the disaster on the 28th.

   There were no news reports before then.

2. I was 9 years old but I clearly remember extensive news coverage, it was a *huge* deal, one of the biggest international news events of my childhood. I’m sure you can find national and local coverage on YouTube.

3. I was only 9 at the time, but it was big enough news that the kids newspaper we got at school covered it.

4. I was 28 years old. I remember that it was downplayed for a while but we were wise enough to know by then that we weren’t going to get anything factual from the Soviets. We were mostly hearing about “radioactive clouds” roaming the world.

5. There are still old USENET posts from the early days of the internet… an interesting perspective:

   https://groups.google.com/forum/?pli=1#!msg/net.followup/OjCofNdza0U/_Owlk9HpvhoJ

6. I wasn’t born yet, but super interesting question. I never thought about this before, but it’s cool to see people’s perspectives who were alive back then

7. I worked for the Department of Energy at the time. However, none of us totally understood the enormity of the event for several days after it happened. Once it became clear to the extent of the event we all cringed at the news casts as the amount of radiation and contamination was certainly going to kill many outright and thousands more early deaths. We also knew it was the end of nuclear power as a viable energy source within the USA given the 3-mile Island debacle.

8. It took awhile for news to be released publicly in the US because the Soviets tried to cover it up for awhile. Once it did it was covered on the news and then updated information showed how terrible it really was.

   Years later we watched a short documentary about it in high school.

9. I was 15. It was the first time I heard of “The Ukraine,” other than in Risk (board game). I remember all the fear of the nuclear arms race, but that is the second nuclear environmental scare I remember, following Three Mile Island, which occurred when I was 8 and had little understanding of what happened. I don’t remember there being *Schadenfreude* around the accident, but there must have been in some circles. As others have said, memories are flawed, and contemporaneous accounts are probably the best source.

10. Here is a broadcasts from the time covering the disaster from ABC. [Link.](https://youtu.be/w_uOSImPSi8) And here’s a report from a British station. [Link.](https://youtu.be/3vHru-wxhEY)
    And here’s an article about how the west got wind on the incident and slowly the full extent of the disaster unraveled. [Link.](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2201677-chernobyl-disaster-how-the-soviet-unions-cover-story-was-blown/) Getting info out of the USSR, especially when it negative, was difficult as they obscured facts and had tight control of the media.

11. Honestly, just another Russian disaster, no doubt due to their shoddy construction, vodka, casual disregard for safety and human life and questionable quality of their technology. That sums up exactly how I thought of it. Late 20s at the time.

12. I vaguely remember it on the news a few weeks after it happened, and everyone at school the next day was like ‘haha, the commies had an accident, those dumbasses’.

    Of course we had no idea that we were >< to having large sections of Europe uninhabitable for centuries.

13. I was 20 when it happened. As you said, we heard about it 3 days after it happened, and then the info that was given was scant, at best. I was in college and don’t remember being overly worried or concerned. In fact, I remember being more concerned about Three Mile Island (I lived in Pennsylvania..not close by but still) than about Chernobyl. Never realized until close to 25/30 years later how catastrophic Chernobyl truly was and how close it came to destroying a huge portion of the Ukraine along with Eastern Europe. To say we were kept in the dark by Russia is a monumental understatement. Excellent book to read is Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham.

14. I was in high school. Most of what we talked about was more along the lines of “gee, that’s a shame for the commies… who are the Cubs playing today?”

    It was covered on the news, but I don’t remember either me or anyone else being particularly worried about it. Some people had a little schadenfreude in that something bad happened to the Soviets, and the news did show maps that had marks for where radiation could end up, etc… This was before the 24 hour news cycle though, so you saw it on the evening news, but the rest of the day was business as usual.

15. My recollection is that it took awhile for details to reach us here. This was still during the Cold War and before the internet existed, obviously. It took a couple of days for news reports to come out and the Soviet government basically had to announce that an accident had happened because radiation spikes were being detected in Europe and people were finding out about it anyway. The Soviets also had to clarify that it was a civilian nuclear facility and not a military operation of some kind.

    It took even longer to get more information of what had actually happened. The Soviets were vague about the details and Western news organizations had limited access.

16. I remember my parents and family talking about it, but I paid more attention to Megatron and Optimus fighting on TV.

17. I was 12 years old in 86. I remember hearing about it on the news, however I watched more news than most of my peers. I don’t think I really asked my parents or teachers for more information or context than I got from watching the news. It didn’t worry me much either. I grew up in the shadow of the Maine Yankee Nuclear Plant and had been to the plant many several times both with field trips from school and family outings with my family. My dad was former navy and had considered reenlisting to go into nuclear propulsion, so nuclear power was something of a family interest.

    Edit: I meant to say that due to my familiarity with nuclear power I had context to understand that there was a difference in safety protocols between the US and USSR so I wasn’t worried about the plant right down the road from me or the plant all the way on the other side of the world.

18. I was 2 years old. My mom posted on IG that I turned to her and stated: “Behold the folly man. We seek to harness the atom, though we can not yet hope to control ourselves.”

19. I was a freshman in ’86. We had nightly news coverage that mostly seemed focused on wind-patterns and where the radiation was blowing. I don’t remember much else. I also remember some graphics and talk about why it happened but that may have been in the immediate following year. By the time I was a senior, I could argue cooling strategies with other people my age getting signatures on petitions to eliminate nuclear energy.

20. I remember thinking ” That’s not going to be good “

21. I remember the news cycle. It was probably on par with the Challenger explosion for importance, but was complicated by a lack of data.

    The Soviets were very controlled with what they shared. We were already concerned about them nuking us. Three mile island had happened a few years earlier.

    I recall the Tom Brokaw talking about it and out wondering if the radioactive clouds would cover the US. Remember that we didn’t have the internet, so speculation on side effects were rampant.

22. I’m late to responding. But I was in my late teens getting ready to go to college and study Russian. So I paid careful attention once people figured out what was going on.

    The world was a very different place and there was no internet, & no social media. And the USSR had a tightly controlled, state run media. It was a lot easier to keep something quiet. Until you couldn’t. And it’s not like the USSR was going to issue a press release. They didn’t even report but within the USSR until they had to.

    IIRC, it wasn’t until radiation was detected in Finland /Sweden/Norway that we had any idea that there was a problem. And then levels kept climbing.

    News back then happened in drips and drabs. And this was big news. 24 hour Cable news channels were still relatively new. And there’s was lots of speculation about what had happened and how bad it would get.

    The world is much smaller now.

    ETA. I visited the USSR a few years later and met a few folks who had been relocated from the Chernobyl area. I was also there when Tianamen square happened. There was nothing in the Soviet news about it. We only knew about it because we heard from relatives back home. Very different world

23. My parents were very into keeping us kids aware of what was going on in the world, I remember being sat in front of the tv for the fall of Saigon with my dad saying “this is history, you need to learn from this”. With Chernobyl I was a young adult and my mom was keeping me apprised because I didn’t have a tv, they detected radiation in northern Europe, they found where the radiation was coming from, etc. She was a “radical Catholic liberal” at that time that stood with nuns chaining themselves to nuclear reactors and she held ill fated block discussions on the dangers of nuclear war.

24. I was in utero so my memory of the event is little hazy.

25. I don’t remember knowing the magnitude of it. I think I heard of it and it was like, “Oh, they had their own Three Mile Island.”

26. My relative was in the nuclear industry and what I’ve heard is that the news didn’t come from Russia or the Ukraine but from places like Switzerland and France that had facilities tracking daily radiation exposure and all of a sudden, the numbers were huge.

27. I wasn’t alive back then, but I talked to my parents about their memories of it when the HBO miniseries on Chernobyl came out in 2019 and my mom told me that one of her coworkers was terrified about “all the radiation in the air.” He wouldn’t even go outside on breaks.

    My parents live in San Francisco, so this guy was freaking out about nothing.

28. I feel like it was a pretty big deal at the time that the news broke here. We weren’t sure exactly what happened at first because getting accurate news out of the Soviets back then was like trying to get it out of North Korea now. I ended up moving to live in Finland as an exchange student shortly after this happened and, unbeknownst to me, move right into the affected path area of the plume.

29. I was stationed in West Germany when it happened. Obviously we were kept in the dark.