Chernobyl disaster due to the ballooning in costs for new nuclear reactor safety system standards and the legal costs in dealing with the increasingly hostile/anxious public opinion, there was a precipitous drop in the rate of new startups after 1986. The accident also raised concerns about the cavalier safety culture in the Soviet nuclear power industry, slowing industry growth and forcing the Soviet government to become less secretive about its procedures. The government coverup of the Chernobyl disaster was a catalyst for glasnost, which "paved the way for reforms leading to the Soviet collapse". On 26 April 1986, at 01:23 (UTC+3), reactor
Effects of the Chernobyl disaster tended to be longer-lived than those released by the detonation of atomic bombs. According to a 2009 United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), the Chernobyl accident had by 2005 caused 61,200 man-Sv of radiation exposure to recovery workers and evacuees, 125,000 man-Sv to the populace of the Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, and a dose to most of the more distant European countries amounting to 115,000 man-Sv. The same report estimated a further 25% more exposure would be received from residual radiosotopes after 2005. The total global collective dose from Chernobyl was earlier estimated by UNSCEAR