Today marks four decades since what’s called the world’s worst nuclear plant disaster—Chernobyl. APR news, in collaboration with the University of Alabama’s Center for Public Television, covered how the accident impacted one central Alabama family.

This Sunday, April 26, marks the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. At 01:23 that morning, while concluding a safety test, reactor number four went into meltdown, triggering a massive steam explosion that sent radioactive fallout across Europe.

The exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear plant is one of the most radioactive sites in the world. Yet scientists regularly carry out research there to analyse the fallout from the 26 April, 1986 disaster.

People streamed into the central square of Slavutych in the early hours of Sunday, placing candles on a large radiation hazard symbol laid out on the ground as a midnight commemoration began for those killed in the Chernobyl disaster 40 years ago and the thousands who risked deadly radiation exposure to contain its aftermath.

"Dogs at Chernobyl are now genetically distinct … thanks to years of exposure to ionizing radiation, study finds."

A catastrophe occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant 40 years ago, on 26 April 1986. Its consequences have affected many countries across Europe one way or another but Belarus has been affected the most.

Following the April 26, 1986, explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, soldiers, firefighters, engineers, miners and medics were summoned from across the USSR. They were known as “liquidators” — an ominous Soviet-era catchall term for those assigned to eliminate a problem.

Forty years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Nobel Prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich says Belarus is still a "laboratory" in which the long-term effects of the massive radiation leak continue to play out.