Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Chernobyl Exclusion Zone The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation (, ) is an officially designated exclusion zone around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster. It is also commonly known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the 30 Kilometre Zone, or simply The Zone (, ). Established by the Soviet Armed Forces soon after the 1986 disaster, it initially existed as an area of radius from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant designated for evacuation and placed under military control. Its borders have since been altered to cover a larger area of Ukraine. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone borders a
Effects of the Chernobyl disaster survival rates of barn swallows are much lower in the Exclusion Zone; 28% of barn swallows inhabiting Chernobyl return each year, while at a control area at Kanev, 250 km to the southeast, the return rate is around 40%. A later study by Møller "et al." (2007) furthermore claimed an elevated frequency of eleven categories of subtle physical abnormalities in barn swallows, such as bent tail feathers, deformed air sacs, deformed beaks, and isolated albinistic feathers. Smith et al. (2007) have disputed Møller's findings and instead proposed that a lack of human influence in the Exclusion Zone locally reduced the