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Located about 81 miles (130 km) north of the city of Kiev, Ukraine, and about 12 miles (20 km) south of the border with Belarus, the four reactors at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant were designed and built during the 1970s and 1980s. A manmade reservoir, roughly 8.5 square miles (22 sq. km) in size and fed by the Pripyat River, was created to provide cooling water for the reactor.
The nearest town to the power plant was the newly built city of Pripyat, which housed almost 50,000 people in 1986, according to the World Nuclear Association. A smaller town, Chornobyl, was home to about 12,000 residents. The remainder of the region was primarily farms and woodland.