Go With the Glow:
Tourism in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
by William Roderick Richardson
There were no birds. At least I didn't see any. I didn't hear any either. Even though the weather was fine.
We were in a ghost town. This deserted city called Pripyat is a short drive from the Chernobyl power station.
Nothing stirred. The wind blew through the trees. The grass grew through the pavement. But no one was home. All 50,000 inhabitants had ben moved out within a couple of days of the accident, that May Day in 1986.
Twenty years later I climbed the stairs of the Polissia Hotel with a party of British sightseers. We were less than seven kilometers away from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and infamous Reactor Four.
Walls peeling.
Rooms trashed by scavengers.
Trees sprouting from the concrete.
Pripyat is the largest ghost town in the world. This ain’t the old West though. This is the new East. But this town—unlike like the old West towns, which were deserted gradually as the gold or the copper or the silver ran out—was evacuated summarily in a time of Abundance, of Hope and of Fear, such as the industrial world had never seen before. The doors of all the buildings are open to reduce the risk to visitors, although many have accumulated too much radioactive material to be safe to visit.
And then here am I, in the company of curious tourists, participating in what may be the strangest vacation excursion in this world.
We are on a tour of the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
A 19-mile radius around the infamous power plant, the zone has largely been closed to the world since Chernobyl's Reactor No. 4 exploded in the early morning hours of 26 April 1986, following a horrific testing error. During a radioactive fire that burned for 10 days, 190 tons of toxic materials were expelled into the atmosphere. The wind blew 70% of the radioactive material into the neighboring country of Belarus. Almost 20 years later, the people of Belarus continue to suffer medically, economically, environmentally and socially from the effects of the disaster.
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The tourist sees places and goes to them, and the traveler goes to places and sees them.
It seemed to make sense at the time. My pal, Craig and I were sipping rum drinks in Sense Cafe in Warsaw at the end of August. It was a balmy evening, a perfect time for dreaming of exotic destinations, sun-burned beaches, sweet zephyrs and small bikinis.
I mentioned I wanted to go to the Ukraine. They had recently dropped the visa requirement for US citizens.
Craig said: „Why don’t you meet me out there at the end of next month. I am organzing a conference there. And I have already arranged a reserved a trip to Chernobyl.”
„How’s that? Chernobyl? You can go there?”
„Sure. I arranged it through a travel agency.”
„I’m in,” I said. „Definitely”
Chernobyl. Few words evoke such universal feelings of dread. Chernobyl was a screw-up on an atomic scale. Some people even believe the accident in May 1986 was a sign of the Apocalypse. Of course, some people believe that about George Bush being elected president of the United States, and some others still believe that about the popularity of Britney Spears. Who can say? People are always looking for the Apocalypse. It’s a kind of hobby. Consider this passage from Revelations:
And the name of the star is called Wormwood:
and the third part of the waters became wormwood.
And many men died of the waters,
because they were made bitter.
Chernobyl is said by some to be the Ukranian word for „wormwood,” and the disaster a sign of the Second
Coming.
Well, if it is, we are still waiting. What seems more relevant is that the socalled Chernobyl explosion—Chernobyl town actually lies 20 kilometers away from to the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant --was a sign of the Final Ending of the Soviet Union. Chernobyl became a one-word catchphrase for lies, incompetence and slow death, encompassed in the wormy body politic of Marxist-Leninism. In true totalitarian form, Soviet citizens were ordered to parade in the nuclear rain on May Day while the families of Party leaders secretly escaped.
On my first day in Kiev I visited the offices of a local English language magazine and spoke to editor Peter Dickinson about my planned trip to Chernobyl. He fished out a copy of his magazine with a list of four tour operators who conduct travelers to the exclusion zone. Two hours later I was booked with a party of six British visitors who would take the tour two days later. It cost me $77.
The journey from Kiev takes about two hours and passes through the flat countryside north of the metropolis. Two-lane roads meander through a sunny, surprisingly scrubby landscape. It looks something like West Texas.
At the entrance to the zone is a military checkpoint. An officer carefully yet politely checks our papers. You have to have special permission to enter the zone.
One of the Brits in quintessential stiff-upper lip form says, „I bet they put on this show just for tourists.” I am not so sure.
Only locals can venture where they wish. Some people, mostly the old, who tired of the city, have returned to live in the Zone, incorporating celisium in their bones and muscles. They eat food grown in the zone. Any food they eat contains radiation. There were scientifically confirmed stories of trees growing faster and vegetables and fruits larger in the aftermath of the explosion. Yet, the old prefer to pass their last years on familiar ground. Tours are carefully monitored, not least because of the hot pockets of radiation which can vary in scope from the size of a frying pan to several hundred meters.
In Chernobyl itself we pick up our guide, Yuriy Tatarchuk, a former history teacher, who likes his present job.
„The money is quite a lot better,” he says.
Wearing a black jumpsuit, Yuri looks as if he is ready for action. Chernobyl town bustles. It’s the home of the workforce carrying out the decommissioning of the plant. Apparently, the guided tours carry no risk. Yuri offhandedly compares the radiation we will experience to being in a jet at 30,000 feet. But the levels are uneven. He carries a geiger counter, switched on the entire time. Pavement is safe.
There are rules:
1. Don't stray.
2. Stay on concrete and asphalt, where exposure risks are lower than on soil.
3. Don't touch anything.
Then we drive through forest along a neglected road, puntuated with glimpses of crumbling houses and farm buildings sprouting trees. After the Chernobyl accident, almost 400,000 were forced to leave their homes for their own safety - homes and villages that had been part of their families for generations. Over 2,000 towns and villages were bulldozed to the ground, and hundreds more stand eerily silent.
It’s a radioactive wilderness, populated with bears, lynx, wild boar and even wolves, which Yuri claims you can hear howling in the long winter nights. They even tried to introduce bison to the region from Bielorussia, but the pair died, not from radiation.
The beauty of the place is underscored by the grim knowledge of what led to the formation of this accidental preserve. beauty cannot be overstated.
In a peaceful field we stopped at a graveyard. It’s the final resting place of radioactive vehicles used to fight Chernobyl's fires. Row upon row of hundreds of fire trucks, ambulances, armored vehicles, trucks, and helicopters. It’s the helicopters-- dead beasts with sagging propellers—that get to me. They dropped sand on the reactor, sand which turned instantly into solid radioactive sludge. It was bizarre. None of us spoke. Across the way was another evacuated ruin of a village.
The vast plant itself crouches on the edge of a huge man-made lake, whose waters were once used for cooling the reactors. We pull up in the shadow of reactor 4, separated from us by a high security wall. The reactor stands about 150 meters away, housed in its"sarcophagus," a concrete-and-sl shell built to contain radtiation. This is ground zero. Without that shell, we would be soaking up dangerous amounts of radiation, enough to kill. And the shell is far from stable even today. There are still about 200 tons of material inside the reactor. The structure is increasingly in danger of collapse. Most tellingly, no one is really sure what is going on inside even to this day. A realistic model of the reactor reveals the dire state inside. Some places inside are not visited to this day because of the radiation levels.
I asked Yuri how dangerous it is for the workers inside, who are still attempting to decomission the plant.
„It is very dangerous, especially if the radiation penetrates your clothing. Some workers have died because they removed their helmets to smoke a cigarette.”
„Inside,” I ask.
„Yes, It is a macho thing with some of the guys. To show they are scared.”
I was working, but the Londoners on my tour, were simply curious.This would be the highlight of their four day weekend in Ukraine.
Pripyat is undoubtedly the hihglight of the trip. Like something out of the Twilight Zone. It was called the world's youngest city when it was built in the 1970's. Pripyat has also turned out to be its shortest lived. On April 26, 1986 the city's anonymity vanished forever when, during a test at 1:21 A.M., reactor 4 blew sky high. The world first learned of history's worst nuclear accident from Sweden, where abnormal radiation levels were registered at one of its nuclear facilities. This is a Pompeii for our times, with its own Warholian short span of fame,silent as the grave and dominated by a huge apartment building crowned by an immense hammer and sickle neon sign. A sign of the times.
On the way to the amusement park, we passed a side entrance to the Palace of Culture. Inside, stood against the wall were placards of communist party leaders of the time. Cardboard witnesses to the legacy of the disaster. It was like being in one of those old American films from the 1950s. I went inside to look around. I would hardly have been surprised if a mutant city dweller with a cyclops eye had jumped out at me.
Outside I snapped pictures of the vacant carnival, imagining the happy voices of children on May Day, 1986 as they rode the now defunt Ferris Wheel and bumper cars, innocently, under the radioactive fallout. I put my camera down on some grass to video the scene.
Yuri immediately said: „I wouldn’t put that down there.”
„Why?” I asked.
„Dust, The dust is radioactive,” he answered.
„I heard that red wine is especially good in combatting the effects of radiation,” I say, thinking of my consumption in a Kiev restaurant the night before.
Yuri answers: „It’s true. People who were drunk at the time of the accident, on any alchohol showed much higher resistance to radiation.”
Pripyat is a testament to vanity.
A huge sign over the hospital reads: "The health of the people is the wealth of the country."
.
Prypyat and the surrounding area will not be safe for human habitation for several centuries.
The Accident in detail:
April 26, 1986 at 1:23 am technicians at the Chernobyl Power Plant allow the power in the fourth reactor to fall to low levels as part of a controlled experiment which went wrong.
The reactor overheats causing a meltdown of the core.
Two explosions blow the top off the reactor building releasing clouds of deadly radioactive material in the atmosphere for ten days.
The people of Chernobyl were exposed to radioactivity 100 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb.
The people of Northern Europe were greeted with clouds of radioactive material being blown northward through the sky.
Seventy percent of the radiation is estimated to have fallen on Belarus
10 years later babies are sill being born with no arms, no eyes, or only stumps for limbs.
Over 15 million people have been victimized by the disaster in some way and that it will cost over 60 Billion dollars to make these people healthy.
More than 600,000 people were involved with the cleanup. Many are now dead or sick.
The Chernobyl Plant is made up of 4 graphite reactors; Number 4 exploded in 1986, Number 2 was shut down from a fire in 1991.
According to a 2003 report by the Russian Atomic Energy Minister, Alexander Rumyantsev, "the concrete shell surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear reactor is in real danger of collapsing at any time."
A new shelter, a 1.3 million euro project scheduled to be completed in 2009, is hoped to safely contain Chernobyl for 100 years.