No trip to Ukraine would be complete without a visit to one of the worlds most well known ecological disasters, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. The Exclusion zone is a controlled perimeter providing approximately 30 Km of clearance around the epicenter of the 1986 Chernobyl atomic power plant meltdown. The site was one of the most visible and potentially devastating atomic power plant disasters due to both the initial explosion at the plant, and the resulting containment efforts. The attempt to stop the meltdown, the ensuing cleanup, and the eventual internment of reactor 4 in concrete were all highly visible due to the power plants proximity to civilization. Also Europe as a whole had a vested interest in the Soviets stopping the meltdown, securing the reactor, and cleaning up as much of the surrounding radioactive fallout as possible.

Chernobyl Power Plant And Cooling River

This information I learned on a guided tour of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone on a beautiful summers day in July. I am not a huge fan of guided tours but on occasion they are necessary, typically because somewhere the powers that be have determined that people cannot be trusted to experience something safely or responsibly on their own. A few situations come to mind. Gaining entrance to North Korea, Turkmenistan, Iran… and the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. These destinations all require registering with a licensed tour guide, and all require this for a variety of different reasons. The reasons can range from controlling what you see and experience therefore shaping your opinion of the location. Prevention of visitors from talking to and influencing locals. Having a general cultural distrust of visitors. Or as is the case in the Exclusion zone, ensuring visitors avoid radioactive hot spots in the woods.

Our groups tour guide was named Vika. An upbeat, cheerfull, and luckly patient Ukranian woman who was to be our guide through the predominantly crumbling infrastructure and buildings in the Exclusion Zone. Armed with a can do, positive attitude made her an expert at dealing with tourists, and, I can only assume, an accurate, functioning dosimeter qualified her to deal with the radiation. We cleared the first security checkpoint of the Zone, which had a surprising amount of security, scanners to detect elevated radiation levels, guards with guns, spike strips, gates, guys with mirrors checking the undersides of vehicles and trundled into the heart of the Zone.

I thought to myself that this might be a little more serious and dangerous than I had initially considered. Everybody else in the little van must have had looks on their faces reflecting similar thoughts because as we set off Vika assured us that most of the contamination had been cleared, that her trusty dosimeter would keep us safe, or at least let us know when we had made a terrible mistake. She also assured us that we would be just fine as long as long as we did not eat any wild fruit or berries and that it was very important we control all our fruit and berry eating impulses. Nothing like a tour guide with gallows humor…

Picking Apples in the Exclusion Zone

Radioactive Hot Spot

As it turns out Vika was not making too much of this initial soothing speech up. The initial cleanup and continued custodial work associated with the site have paid off as today much of the exclusion zone is accessible enough to allow meaningful work. Albeit only for short controlled periods of time. For example once the site was stabilized the remaining 3 reactors at the power plant continued operation with the last being shut down in 2000. Inside the zone the town of Chernobyl, about 14 Km from the powerplant, is now an administrative center providing facilities for workers who are still cleaning up the site 30 years later. The town also provided facilities for tourists visiting the exclusion zone, my tour group had lunch in this town prior to exploring another town called Pripyat.

Sign for the Town of Chernobyl

Strange what you can find…

Pripyat is an abandoned town 7 Km from the power plant which is now a playground for tourists visiting the exclusion zone. Exhibiting a Marina, Hospital, Apartment buildings, Mall, Hotel, Restaurant, Theater, School, and Amusement Park there are plenty of interesting things to see. The day after the initial meltdown, when people were finally evacuated from Pripyat, they were told that they would be able to return so they left most of their possessions. As time went on it was clear they would not be able to return. This lends an interesting, somewhat abandoned / frozen in time quality to Pripyat.

The experience of visiting Pripyat is strange before the city is even entered. It starts the moment the towns roadside sign is passed. A large, shiny, impressive Soviet style sign that would make anybody proud to call the workers paradise of Pripyat home, and does not conclude until the towns far less impressive security checkpoint is exited. A small dusty outpost with a crooked roof and broken windows. From a distance it looks as though a machine gun is in place to defend the road but as the van bounced closer the menacing machine gun turned out to be a few pieces of metal welded together in the shape of a weapon and painted black. Allong side the non working machine gun was a non working white and red traffic control gate inoperable due to its plastic clad copper guts hanging out of an access hatch and strewn across the ground. The immediate area decorated with the ever tempting apple tree, and always friendly stray dog.

Sign for the Town of Pripyat

Guard Shack outside Pripyat

Stray dog and Vika

After passing through the security checkpoint the van crept down a potholed, heaving, overgrown road toward Pripyat. A fitting entrance to the town and astoundingly not the worse road I had driven on in Ukraine. Branches scratched along the sides of the van as we were violently jostled up and down. This hellacious ride was occasionally punctuated by the fleeting view of a empty, vine covered, tenement building looming through the forest. Also by the glib jokes and the ever clever dialogue from our tour guide Vika. We rolled through the roads of the abandoned town and visited allegedly safe sites whose security was corroborated by Vikas trusty dosimeter and reassurances that the background radiation levels were far below the international safe levels. In spite of these assurances the dosimeter seemed to be in a constant state of alarm as it beeped and flashed as we explored. Empty building after empty building was passed by or through, abandoned infrastructure, roads, power lines, docks, parking lots all still in place but deteriorating and being overtaken by nature. The empty buildings standing as monuments to the meltdown three decades earlier.

Hallway in Pripyat Hospital

Abandoned Apartment

Amusement Park

Pripyat

Stained Glass Pripyat

After the initial plant explosion irreversibly damaging reactor 4 the fission reaction previously harnessed to bring power to the people began to race out of controll Eventually the meltdown of reactor 4 was stopped, narrowly averting a second potential steam explosion which could have distributed devastating amounts of radioactive debris across Europe. once the meltdown of the reactor was no longer deemed in a critical state the Soviets began construction of a concrete structure which encased the damaged reactor. This accomplished two things. First the concrete “sarcophagus” contained the main concentration of contaminants and prevented further spreading of them by the wind and rain. Second it protected the fuel and prevented unauthorized access to refined atomic material.

Containment of Reactor 4

After the construction of the sarcophagus the cleanup of the contaminants could begin. Highly irradiated buildings were bulldozed and buried along with highly contaminated soil. Critical infrastructure was not destroyed but cleaned in an attempt to preserve something of potential use. The cleaning and clearing of contaminated materials did not eliminate the dangerous contaminants but created concentrated hot spots where the radiation levels are dangerously high. This is one of the reasons people are not allowed to freely wander through the Exclusion Zone unattended. In spite of the efforts to clean and contain the contaminants the Exclusion Zone was created, evacuated, and security checkpoints were erected to control the flow of people into and out of the area.

Not only was the meltdown of reactor 4 bad enough to warrant the city and adjacent homes and farms to be abandoned. But the contamination was so bad that there has never been a formal effort to reclaim the materials still in the exclusion zone. This does not mean that there have not been informal efforts by enterprising individuals, hereby referred to as looters, to reclaim copper, scrap metal, or shortly after the incident, abandoned goods in the homes. This also does not mean that the zone was abandoned entirely.

The zone is still populated by a small group of individuals who refuse to leave their farms or have moved back after the initial evacuation. These people are predominantly older and not so worried about exposure to hazards in the exclusion zone. The Ukrainian government, although not officially supporting these settlers still often provide minimal infrastructure to them. The roads can be traversed by normal vehicles, although not too fast. Electricity is also provided to some of the residents. After a long day investigating the empty dead husks of buildings it was time to visit the remaining vestiges of the bustling life that existed prior to reactor 4 melting down.

On the way to visit the Samosel or “settlers” of the exclusion zone a quick collection was taken to buy some basic groceries, Vika explained that the woman we were going to visit had difficulty traveling to get groceries because she was very old, but delightfully spunky. We stopped at a little shop, Vika picked up some sundries and before long we were once again bouncing along an overgrown road. Finally we pulled up to a rustic homestead surrounded with a sturdy planked wall, disembarked from the bus and waited in suspense in front of the walls gate. After a minute some rustling could be heard from the other side as the gate was unbolted and slowly opened revealing our host.

Baba, which is Ukrainian for Grandmother was just as Vika had explained her, a very old, very spunky woman who quickly beckoned us in, sat us down at a table, and had Vika begin bringing out platters of food, and most importantly Chernobyl Exclusion Zone moonshine, all home made on the homestead by Baba. After making a toast to the hospitality and continued good health of Baba we tucked into the food. Pastries, Bread, Borscht, and good conversation were had by all. After eating, with hugs and toothless gummy kisses, we bade goodbye to Baba, reboarded the bus and made our way out of the Zone.

Dinner with Baba

The day had been much more insightful than I had expected and I left The Exclusion Zone in a mood far more somber than the one I had entered with. I reflected on the initial plan and realized what a strange one it was; Get on a bus heading into one of the most contaminated locations on the planet, snap a few photos, oooh and ahhh at the empty buildings, and be able to say I had been to Chernobyl. Allow me to illustrate the issues with this initial plan and the thoughts that were weighing on my mind as the bus hastened away from Chernobyl.

The pollution wasn’t the type that could be avoided by taking relatively simple precautions such as gloves, respirators, and rubber boots (although these things definitely could be helpful in preventing exposure). The contaminants in the zone are radioactive isotopes of elements such as of Iodine, Caesium, Strontium. As these isotopes decay and eventually break down they emit alpha, beta, and gamma particles. These particles can cause adverse health effects such as radiation poisoning or cancer. Eventually these isotopes naturally decompose into less and less dangerous forms. Eventually they will no longer emit radiation. this process can take thousands of years depending on the isotope. The final form these isotopes decompose into is lead. What this means is that to some extent the contaminated areas around reactor 4 will be contaminated with radioactive substances and be challenging to utilize for thousands of years. After that the radioactive material will thankfully become lead which right after mercury is everyone’s favorite heavy metal.

The buildings I was treating like a playground were once homes, businesses, places of entertainment and relaxation, and institutions of health, wellness, and education to a large community. In 1986 this was all ripped away from the people who lived in the communities surrounding the Chernobyl power plant. Every glassless window, and crooked door in every tenement building represented a home which had to be abandoned. The visit with one of the remaining settlers in the zone really drove home the human factor which was easy to not think about in a place largely devoid of people.

Traveling to Chernobyl was something I was initially excited about, with a light heart I embarked on the tour of the Exclusion zone in the morning. I thought it would be fun and interesting, which it most certainly was. But throughout the day I learned about the disaster, the heroic first responders, the effort to control and stop the meltdown which had high stakes and serious repercussions for Ukraine, The Soviet Union, and Europe as a collective group. The Liquidators who cleaned up the site. The effort to build something to contain the damaged reactor. The international effort 30 years later in 2016 to rebuild a structure to contain the reactor. The current plan spanning hundreds of years to disassemble reactor 4 and store the contaminated materials. The human impact of the disaster. As I rolled along the road through the twilight, the lights of Kiev burning in the distance, I couldn’t shake the question that keep pushing into my mind… Was it really worth it?