After the Chernobyl incident, exactly three years before my birthday, there were many problems surrounding the decontamination and reduction of present radiation.  A pool of fire water and cooling water lied below Reactor 4 from broken pipes.  Because a lot of graphite had become molten with other radioactive substances there was concern that if it made contact with the pool of water, a steam explosion could occur, releasing lethal amounts of radiation into the air.  Unfortunatly the only way to drain the pool was by opening the sluice gates, located under the radiated water.  Three men voluteered for the dive.  Alexei Ananenko helped design the Sluice Gates and as such knew where they were located.  He had a wife.  Valeri Bezpalov was another prominent engineer at Chernobyl.  He had a wife and three children, feeding them was the reason he took such a high paying yet dangerous job of nuclear power plant engineer.  Boris Baranov was a run of the mill worker, who just did what he was told.  He had no family, or loved ones.  They knew of the risks, and understood that water with a radiation level of 20,000 röntgen per hour was far past the lethal range of 100 r/h.  These three men both entered the water under the reactor, managed to open the gates, and were never seen again, they never surfaced.  Theories suggest that they managed to make it to the gates while being irradiated, but once they were there, it was too late, and there bodies succumbed to acute radiation poisoining.  Other theories suggest that they boiled to death from the intense heat of the molten graphite. 

-K Dawg out