That name if you are of a certain age resonates with power.
2B had encouraged us to take a tour of the site and out of curiosity we decided to do so. It was a good decision.
The name, Chernobyl is associated with one of the worse peacetime nuclear disasters. If you were too young to have been exposed to it as it happened or if it has been too long, this is going to be a relatively detailed and deep blog post. I have included a number of links to other sites so you can get more than I have the room to include here. Please take the time to at least scan them.
I would suggest you begin by going to the Wikipedia article about it to get the overview.
You will ask if it is safe to be doing such a tour. I can only hope that the tour operators and the Ukrainian government are being honest. They provide you a short video on your way their showing the measurement of radioactive exposure in the tour compared to radioactive exposure one gets on a long air flight (when you are high enough that less radioactivity is filtered out by the atmosphere). (Note: This did not so much reassure me about my visit to the Chernobyl disaster site as fill me with distress over the consequences of my decades long air travel experience!)
Let's start our visit
There is a 30 kilometer and 10 kilometer exclusion zone around the area
One passes through check points at each, has to show ones passport and is given a radioactivity monitor which records how much you have been exposed to during the visit
The road in...
...very quiet
The sign for the town of Chernobyl - now abandoned
Although this town gave its name to the complex and disaster, it is not the major visual impact site
A monument because some thought the disaster was predicted in the Book of Revelations
A monument for all the villages and towns abandoned within the Exclusion Zone
An abandoned Kindergarten school
Now to the site of the reactors themselves
Chernobyl was to be the largest nuclear power complex in the world
Four reactors were operational in 1986
Two more were under construction and 6 more were planned
A cooling tower half-constructed
Reactor #5 under construction
Every crane left exactly where it was on April 26, 1986
The New Safe Containment Facility
To understand this and the magnitude of the issues I strongly urge you to watch these videos
We now drive to the most impactful site
The abandoned town Pripyat
Imagine living in a city of 50,000 people
A new town that is a show piece of urban living
And being ordered to leave it - forever - with no notice
Watch this video first of the city before the disaster
Now watch this one of our walking in the abandoned city and this one
Here are a number of photos where our guide showed us before pictures of what we were seeing now
The main town entrance
A grocery store
The disaster and evacuation took place just before May 1 when a great May Day celebration was to done with the opening of an amusement park and a new sports stadium
Our Guide Tanya
Looking from the front of the stands to the playing field
The river transportation center
Where the ferries loaded
Inside a school and then the movie theater
At the entrance to the school
Celebrating the friendly atom
We left Pripyat and went to the site of an abandoned Soviet missile detection site
It is the only one of its kind still erect because of the radioactivity associated with the metal
1 comment:
That's something I'd really like to see someday. And unfortunately, I can probably count on it still being there whenever I get around to traveling there.
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