I dreamed up a conspiracy theory about it some time back, but I forget it exactly. Something about the date and such maybe. There is something rather appealing about the idea it was related to the woodpecker array down the road and an experiment.

At least, the whole thing how ukrainians quickly connected the event to Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker movie, and then the game.

Regardless of any of these, the trajectory towards total collapse of the USSR was well and truly on course when it happened.

What is more of a concern to me is that they built Fukushima on sand and that thing never has had a sarcophagus. 6 months of meltdown, the nature is mostly recovered, only the condensed uranium on metal and dust inside buildings is dangerous, and the sarcophagus is being replaced. But 5 years and I have still not heard the fire is out in Fukushima.