Chernobyl's location
Chernobyl is a small town of 12,500 inhabitants, in Ukraine, a region of the Soviet Union in 1986. It is located about 110 kilometers north of Kiev (Kyiv in Ukrainian), the capital of Ukraine, with its 2.5 million inhabitants. The nuclear power station, built along the Pripyat River, is located three kilometers to the southeast of the town of Pripyat, and about fifteen kilometers south of the Belarusian border.
Map of the Chernobyl area - Chernobyl is practically located at the confluence of Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian Federation.
Construction of the plant began in the '70s with the reactor No. 1, which came into service in 1977, followed by the No. 2 reactor in 1978 and reactor No. 3 and No. 4 respectively in 1981 and 1983. At the time of the accident, two other reactors, No. 5 and No. 6 were under construction. Each of these reactors, type RBMK, had a power of one gigawatt (GW), and in 1986, the plant with its four operational reactors producing around 10% of the electrical energy of Ukraine.
A cooling reservoir for the reactors was built southeast of the plant on the Pripyat River, which then joins the Dnieper River to Kiev.
The Chernobyl site today (Google Earth photo)