History is littered with events that evoke powerful memories with the utterance of just one word… Watergate, Dunkirk, and Titanic. When it comes to evoking feelings of dread, there is one that fills the mind with a myriad of destructive imagery and connotation even to this day. That word is Chernobyl.

Thirty-three years ago at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the city of Pripyat in Ukraine, a late night safety test went wrong and the world experienced the worst nuclear accident of all time. Dozens of people were killed in the immediate aftermath and thousands more in the ensuing years. The disaster released 400 times more radiation into the atmosphere than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and contaminated millions of acres of surrounding land. Few people realise though that the scale of destruction could have been far worse if it weren’t for the bravery of three volunteers.