A safety test at a nuclear plant caused the worst nuclear accident in history

On 26 April 1986, engineers at Chernobyl's Reactor 4 ran a poorly designed test simulating a power outage, disabling safety systems in the process. The reactor exploded, spreading radioactive fallout across much of Europe; the surrounding exclusion zone remains largely uninhabited to this day.

— Serhii Plokhy, Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy — 2018
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