We were among the few who are allowed to walk around reactor 5 and 6 cooling towers.Above are the unfinished cooling towers for reactors 5 and 6. They were still under construction at the time of the accident and have been left unfinished to this very day. There is a lot of debris scattered around this area -- from what exactly, it is hard to tell. Radiation levels vary greatly here, and at one point the dosimeter gave a loud warning of high radiation levels, enough to make our guide jump. Interestingly, the famous 1986 explosion is not the only incident to occur at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (CNPP). In 1982, reactor number 1 experienced a partial core meltdown, but due to Soviet secrecy the accident was kept quiet for many years and the compromised reactor was only out of service for a few months before it was repaired and put back into operation. No resulting fatalities are known. In 1991, five years after the 1986 explosion, a fire broke out in the turbine hall of reactor 2. It was at this point they decided to close down reactor 2 for good. Reactor 1 was shutdown in 1996 and the remaining reactor 3 was switched off by then-Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma on December 15, 2000. A new containment structure for the dilapidated reactor 4 and its sarcophagus was commissioned in 2007 and is now in the design phase. Construction is expected to cost roughly $1.6 billion dollars. Once the 190-meter wide and 200-meter long steel arched-shaped structure is completed and wheeled into place, engineers can finally start breaking down what is left of reactor 4 safely.
Pripyat city sign and the 'Bridge of Death' with reactor 4 in the distance, less than a mile away. Pripyat.
Pripyat (as the sign says above left) is a relatively new city founded in 1970 to house the workers of the Chernobyl plant. At the time of its evacuation following the 1986 explosion it was a young city, where the average age of its populous was only twenty-six years old. Surprisingly, in the morning after the accident, most people went about their business unaware of the magnitude of the disaster that was unfolding less then 3km away from their homes. Radiation levels throughout Pripyat were extremely dangerous and most people were going about their daily lives completely oblivious to this fact. Some people who had noticed something was afoot had gone to the bridge (pictured above-right) just outside the city on the road to the power plant to watch what was happening from there. They all received fatal doses of radiation and thus the bridge has been nicknamed "The Bridge of Death." Today, it has been completely cleaned of any radiation contamination and is safe to cross or walk on, and serves as the main road into Pripyat.
It was only after Forsmark Nuclear power plant in Sweden measured elevated levels at their facility and concluded it must be coming from somewhere in Russia, did the Soviet authorities admit they had a problem. The following warning message was reported on local radio: "An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. One of the atomic reactors has been damaged. Aid will be given to those affected and a committee of government inquiry has been set up." By the evening of April 26, 1986, a committee had been formed (including the then head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Hans Blix, who would later go on to lead the search for Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons in Iraq) and had arrived at the sight of the accident. By this time at least two people directly linked to the explosion were dead and approximately fifty people had been hospitalized, some of them in Pripyat hospital. More than twenty-four hours after the explosion, the committee ordered the evacuation of Pripyat.
At 14:00 hours on April 27, 1986, the order for the evacuation of the city of Pripyat begun. It took just three hours to evacuate a little under fifty-thousand people. Residents were told the evacuation was temporary, lasting for only a few days, and were instructed to take only necessary belongings such as personal documents and enough clothing for less than a week. To this day, over twenty years later, no one has ever returned to live in the city. It is this which makes Pripyat an attraction for certain people like me to visit. However, over time and mainly at the turn of this century, most of the city has been looted and vandalized. Little is left in the buildings and apartments now, but occasionally you will run into artifacts -- broken vinyl records, sheet of newspapers, a school book or child's toy -- all left in haste during of the final days of the city's habitation.
