Chernobyl's last wedding: The couple who married as a nuclear disaster unfolded

Chernobyl's last wedding: The couple who married as a nuclear disaster unfolded7 hours agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleJordan DunbarBBC World Service, Chernobyl, Estonia and GermanyBBC"We really can't be one without the other," says Iryna after 40 years of marriageIt was just after midnight. Iryna Stetsenko had finished doing her nails for her wedding, opened the balcony door and was battling her nerves to get to sleep.In a nearby apartment packed with guests, her fiancé Serhiy Lobanov was asleep on a mattress in the kitchen.Then a "rumble" disturbed the quiet, says Iryna. "It was as if a lot of planes were flying overhead, everything was humming and the glass in the windows shook."Serhiy says he "felt a shake, as if some kind of wave passed", wondered if it was a mild earthquake, and fell back to sleep.The 19-year-old trainee teacher and power plant engineer, who was 25, were looking forward to married life in the newly built Soviet city of Pripyat. They had no idea that the world's worst ever nuclear accident was unfolding less than 2.5 miles (4km) away.SHONE/GAMMA/Gamma-Rapho via Getty ImagesThe damaged reactor four, pictured here three days after the explosion, emitted highly dangerous radioactive materialReactor number four at the Chernobyl power plant – in what is now northern Ukraine - had exploded, spewing out radioactive material that would spread across swathes of Europe.Forty years later, the highly radioactive remains of the plant are in a warzone. The couple now live in Berlin, having uprooted their lives a second time - this time to escape conflict, not a nuclear disaster.But on the morning of 26 April 1986, Serhiy remembers waking around 6am, full of excitement, to find his wedding day had dawned gloriously sunny.He had errands to do - bed linen to take to a friend's apartment where he and Iryna planned to sleep that night, and flowers to buy.Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/ShutterstockW...