This time last week I was falling asleep at work because I only got home from Ukraine in the early hours of Monday morning. And one of the things I did while I was over there was a day trip into the Chernobyl radiation zone.
If the name Chernobyl doesn’t mean much to you, it was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history – not merely a reactor meltdown but an explosion. A nuclear reactor exploded. If you want full details, take a look at my Chernobyl tag on my Tumblr, because I can write a lot about the background when I get going.
In short, a safety test was scheduled, it went wrong, there was a power surge and an explosion. Radioactive material got showered everywhere, the insides of the reactor caught fire in a big way and the smoke scattered more radioactive material. Pretty much everyone on the scene died within the month from acute radiation sickness; thousands of people living nearby had radiation-related cancers.
36 hours after the explosion, the authorities evacuated the area. Yes, thirty-six hours later. I don’t want to say the Soviet Union’s safety reputation precedes them but… Anyway, 32 years on, most of the 30km Exclusion Zone is still uninhabited – mostly – and uninhabitable – more or less. The nuclear power station, which continued producing electricity until 2000, is being decommissioned, which takes staff. Self-settlers, people who returned home after being evacuated, live there. As for uninhabitable, radiation levels have dropped pretty sharply. That doesn’t mean it’s safe – it won’t be safe for 200,000 years – but workers are under strict guidelines and the average age of a self-settler is 85. You can go there for a day or a few days or even a surprisingly long time without even reaching the level of “may or may not have increased risk of certain cancers”. It’s still only increased risk.
So that’s what’s going on in the Zone. I used to occasionally read about the accident, mostly when I felt like having nightmares. The full story with all the details is truly horrifying. But I never thought about going there. Even when I booked my flights to Ukraine, it didn’t even cross my mind to go there. Didn’t cross my mind that it was possible.
How to get into the Exclusion Zone? Book a tour. There are plenty of companies that do it. They will apply for a special visitor’s pass and you will need to show your passport (or Ukrainian national ID card) at up to three military-controlled checkpoints, depending how far into the Zone you want to go. Sneaking in is difficult, insanely dangerous and also illegal – I for one do not fancy a visit to a Ukrainian jail, which is what happens if you get caught. It also means you can’t get at the souvenir stands at CP Dytiatky, so you’re all out of luck if you fancied a bright yellow t-shirt with a gas mask and the word RADIOACTIVE! on the front.
Oh – you’re not allowed to take photos at the checkpoint but the Google Maps cars are allowed to drive right through…
Going with a tour company means you get a guide who will be able to tell you everything about the place and the history, keep you safe from radiation while pointing out spectacularly radioactive hotspots. A tour will pretty much always include the kindergarten where you see all those photos of abandoned dolls, Pripyat, which is the ghost city that used to house the power plant workers, and Reactor 4 itself, the one that exploded.
Back when I was thinking about booking it, it felt a bit ghoulish. This is disaster tourism, plain and simple. But you know what? The reality was that it felt like a school trip, only one in which I had more interest than “No maths today!” (That’s a bit of a lie; I quite liked maths when I was at the age at which we still did school trips.) I learned so much, I made pages & pages of notes and I still came back feeling like I knew nothing, with far more questions than answers. I spent the journey home from the airport dredging up everything I knew about nuclear physics from my A Levels & making a mental list of all the gaps and all the things I needed to research.
In part 2, out Thursday, I’ll take you right into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.