Senior reactor operator Leonid Toptunov was 25 years old when he sat down at the controls of Reactor Number Four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It was just after midnight on April 26, 1986. He would be dead within three days.
At 1:23am and 44 seconds, a power surge of catastrophic proportions tore the 1,000-tonne concrete roof off the reactor and blasted the equivalent of 500 Hiroshima bombs worth of radiation into the night sky above Soviet Ukraine.
In Pripyat, a city of 50,000 people built for one purpose only: Chernobyl, the buses were already on their way. The residents would never return home.
In extraordinary detail, Minute by Minute: Chernobyl reconstructs how the world's worst nuclear disaster unfolded – from the routine safety test that spiralled out of control, through the desperate hours as firefighters and engineers fought an invisible killer without knowing what they faced, to the cover-up that reached all the way to the Kremlin, and the clean-up operation that exposed around 700,000 people to dangerous levels of radiation.
Narrated by legendary broadcaster Michael Buerk, this is the definitive minute-by-minute account of the Chernobyl disaster - 40 years on.
Host: Michael Buerk
Producer: John Rogers
Sound Design: John Scott
Executive Producers: Bella Soames and Jamie East
A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular
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Ireland