

The world’s oddest tourist attraction


Pripyat was abandoned just days before a new amusement park was to open so this ferris wheel has rusted untouched for 25 years.

It took some doing to get past the rules, guards and warnings into what has to be the world’s oddest tourist attraction: The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exclusion zone in Ukraine.

But that’s the perversity of chasing news. The bigger the disaster, the messier the misery the better the story. So, for 71 journalists in Kiev for a global conference on investigative reporting earlier this month, the allure of a tour of the scene of the world’s worst nuclear disaster was insurmountable. A quarter century ago in the spring of 1986 humans at this spot came as close as they ever have to ending life on the planet That 25th anniversary of “the accident” as it is referred to, plus the earthquake and tsunami that threatened nuclear ruin in Japan this year, have turned Chernobyl newsworthy again.

The tours for small numbers of interested people have been allowed since 2002.

We applied to the Ukraine Ministry of Foreign Affairs for day passes into the exclusion zone. We had to submit press passes, letters from media employers and passports.  That got us on a list that surly uniformed guards stationed outside the zone consulted closely when our bus drove up to their checkpoint. It felt like East Berlin, showing our passports to scowling guards who held back seven journalists because their passport numbers did not match their lists. Most had left off the multiple zeros that precede passport numbers in that country. It took an hour of negotiation to win the “The Zero Club” passage inside the ghost town of the zone.  While we waited we went all journalistic and as a herd, shot stills and video of the checkpoint, a religious shrine to victims of the accident, warnings about the radiation danger at the sight. Many of us posed, smiling even, in the photos.

The leaking sarcophagus and scaffolding around Chernobyl Reactor #4

Once inside we all were required to sign a set of rules in Russian and English (no weapons, drugs, liquor or open-toed shoes allowed) and a scary promise that we would not hold the Ukraine government accountable for any deterioration in our health that might follow our visit. We had to stay close to Nikolai Fomin, a government-provided guide wearing one Geiger counter and carrying another. We could not touch anything, much less steal a souvenir.

“Do not step on the moss,” he warned us. That was the rule that got me. The moss around the old power plant is thick and brilliant bright green and seemed to me the only sign of anything amiss in the zone. Radiation is not photogenic as it turns out and so the zone seemed overgrown, abandoned, but normal. Except for the bright moss. Because it is spongy and absorbent it soaks up about five times more radiation then the blacktop and cement it pokes up between.

The other big rule was that we could take pictures of Reactor #4, the one that nearly melted down setting off an explosion, fire and massive release of contamination, from a spot about 200 meters away but we had to point our cameras directly at it and no where else.

Sure. Seventy-one journalists obeyed that rule strictly.

Why can’t we take pictures of that? we asked about a cement-encased building near the entombed reactor that holds radioactive solids and metals from the salvage after the accident.

Terrorists, the guide told us.

It was hard to imagine terrorists doing worse than has already happened in this place first because of the accident, then because of nationalistic pride and now because of corruption.

The Soviets waited some 36 hours before alerting anyone to a failed test at the power plant that set off the nuclear disaster. Only after Swedes began picking up on the plume of poisonous isotopes did they sound alarms. Then within three days they pulled 130,000 workers and residents out from the villages and towns around the power plant.  They were stuffed onto buses and told to bring just some few clothes, money and a little food. They left everything else even pets.

In Pripyat, a company town of some 50,000 power plant workers and their families, the authorities promised they’d all be back home in three days. They never returned.  Government crews came instead, breaking out nearly every window in every building and tossing radioactive furnishings and goods into the streets where they were swept up and buried in cemeteries.

“Why did authorities try to hide the accident?” our guide was asked. “It was Cold War times,” he responded. “They were afraid the United States would think they could not control nuclear power.”

Not everyone stayed resettled elsewhere.  Some 1,200 people came back after the explosion, according to the official version of events. Too poor, too old to make a new life elsewhere they came back to their ruined homes. They have been heavily monitored and tested ever since as befits their status as real-life guinea pigs in a radiation experiment. No journalists were allowed to meet or talk with the 180 still alive.

How many died of cancers or other radiation effects, in fact, how many victims Chernobyl claimed is unknown.  The Soviets admitted to 31 deaths in the months after the accidents, all reactor staffers, firefighters and emergency responders. Beyond that they tried to thwart any counting of casualties. The World Health Organization estimates 4,000 civilian deaths.  Today about 5,000 military staffers are stationed in and around Chernobyl, we were told, assigned to contain the contamination to air, water and soil within the zone.

That has not been easy, particularly, as it turns out because Reactor #4 continues to spew radioactive waste beneath its sagging and leaking sarcophagus. I was surprised we were allowed to take pictures of the makeshift containment unit, so rickety and insecure does it look. Scaffolding and iron grating was added a decade ago to try and strengthen the structure.

Work has been underway for some time on a new sarcophagus, one that can last for the centuries it will take before the reactor cools down to safety. Cranes loom over and around the old building. The idea is that a new containment structure will be built and then rolled on sliders over the old sarcophagus. That is very difficult technically, the guide told us. News reports are that delay is financial. Money for the project, supplied mostly by the European Union has not been disappearing in Ukraine.

For that matter, who is collecting fees for tours of the zone that can be as high as $300 a person?

In the end the Chernobyl exclusion zone offered a sobering glimpse into human failure and waste.  It’s like a scene from a Stephen King novel of the future. We saw trees and shrubs taking over apartments and streets, a riverbank littered with abandoned ships, a field of still radioactive tanks. And then there were the oddly fake memorials. A statue of an angel of technology calling to the dead in one place, a gigantically sized monument in another to firefighters who gave their lives to save the world.

More people should see this place. I’m not sure we journalists took in its full import. At one point while standing in front of a radiation warning sign, our guide Fomin lit up a cigarette. Ukrainians smoke a lot, even indoors yet. Automatically, though, we turned paparazzi blazing cameras at him, delighted at our cleverness seeing the death threat he ignores working at ground zero of a bigger threat.  Shortly after we stepped into walk-in monitors that registered how much radiation we’d been exposed to – about the same as a flight across Europe – and went off to a dinner of Ukrainian delicacies.

Categories: General
Rosemary Armao

3 Responses

  1. Dianne says:

    Rosemary, it’s incredible they let tours go through there. But it’s important not to forget. It’s always the firefighters going into the catastrophe to save others who take such a hit to life and welfare. We shouldn’t forget that, either.

    I saw a fabulous nature program on PBS about the radioactive wolves in the zone. They’ve been successfully breeding and thriving there. Nature is a force, and it always seems to bounce back no matter what mankind does.


    • Rosemary Armao says:

      Yes, they asked that we stay together in a group because of wolves and wild boar. No hunters, no human interference and they are doing great. No telling about their genes, however.

  2. Paul G. says:

    Hah what an interesting study that would be! I wonder if the boars and wolves are isolated enough to begin an meaningful divergence from the surrounding populations. Probably not, I don’t think they read Russian “Warning: radiation” signs.
    Really interesting read!