It could have been apocalyptic, a bang to set off a chain reaction of bangs that would shroud the world in a pall of radiation, poison the waters of Europe before leeching into the seas and oceans of the world. And yet, 32 years later it’s a tourist spot. Chernobyl is burned into the minds of people as a byword for disaster and as a child I was fascinated by what happened there. Even today it’s seen as a deadly place of silence and mutated creatures roaming the landscape. Having read a chunky history of the Chernobyl catastrophe, by Serhii Plokhii, there were so many missteps and calamities that it’s a minor miracle I’m able to type this and perhaps a bigger miracle that I was able to have lunch in the power plant’s canteen, just a few hundred metres away from where the explosion happened. Recently, a gleaming containment unit was slid into place, soaring above the old reactor and hastily assembled concrete sarcophagus that stopped the radiation completely escaping.
People know about the event itself in the broadest of terms, but often it is the people that lived around the plant who are forgotten, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of liquidators who worked tirelessly to lessen the effects of the disaster, potentially saving the world but subjecting themselves to personal catastrophes such as a lifetime of ill-health, or a swift but brutal death.
Reading Plokhii’s book, I saw a horrific image of the aftermath of the explosion. Chaos everywhere, chunks of radioactive graphite burning all around and people rapidly becoming sick. In a chain reaction, as one person got sick from the radiation, they’d struggle to tell someone coming in what had happened – perhaps also too terrified to even admit what they knew if they did know anything – and that new person would quickly get to work before they fell ill. Imagine that; it’d be like trying to evacuate a sinking ship while suffering from overwhelming sea sickness.
Booking a tour to the exclusion zone is easy; but to maintain the idea of danger, the tour company Go2Chernobyl plaster their website with radiation symbols and a strange promise to take you somewhere extreme, that’s also safe and comfortable. Which is true, I suppose, otherwise nearly 50,000 people wouldn’t have visited Pripyat in 2018. Hints that this isn’t a usual excursion come when you are required to book your trip in advance to obtain permits and the many email reminders that without passport details you won’t be allowed to enter the 30km exclusion and 10km exclusion zones.
We meet other intrepid adventurers on a gloomy day by Kiev central train station. Nobody makes much of an effort to talk to one another, though that makes sense. We’re not exactly going bungee jumping. While we wait to go, we’re asked if we want to hire dosimeters but we choose not to. Some tours offer this and make the machines look rather scary, but I stick to the belief that this is just a money-making ploy; it’s safe enough to visit, so when the machine beeps a bit, it’s not going to reach a figure that’s meaningful. I absorbed more radiation in my flight to Kiev from London than spending a day near the power plant and you don’t find the air stewards shoving dosimeters in your face the whole time. An idea for Ryanair, there.
On the journey to the exclusion zone, a video is put on with terrible CGI of the explosion and lots of people sounding earnest or sad, which is reasonable enough. Eventually, when we arrive, I step out and go to the toilet, which is just past the barrier that separates the normal world and the world of the exclusion zone. I witness a strange frisson of excitement as I pass through a little divide between everything being OK and things being not OK for hundreds of years and everything still looks exactly the same. A road leads forever deeper into the forest and nothing seems to be moving, so it certainly scored highly on the eerie atmosphere I thought would exist. We wait for an age at the checkpoint, seeing gorgeous dogs that I wanted to pet but thought better of.
We visit Chernobyl town and it looks like you might expect a run-down ex-soviet town to look but with some subtle differences. Utility pipes run above ground because the soil is contaminated so nothing can be buried underground. People still work here, but can only work 15 days in the zone and 15 off due to the build-up of radiation. Inside the town is a museum, filled with dolls and baby gas masks as well as information about what happened. In a side room there’s a large painting depicting the scene where the firefighters were attempting to put out the blazes at the plant. It’s strangely poignant to see it stored away from other items and there was also something very tragic about the painting knowing what we know now, seeing the effort and exertion in their faces. Despite the museum’s artefacts and modern installation, this painting was by far the most immediately shocking and arresting thing in there. Outside in the rain, the Wormwood Star memorial is a long line of names of abandoned towns and a large statue of an angel. Nearby is a statue of Lenin; it’s one of two that remain standing in Ukraine. The other is also in the exclusion zone, making this place feel even more like a timewarp.
Our second stop is the Duga radar station, which is a fascinating place I hadn’t heard about until I booked the tour. Our guides explained that the radar was designed to know if the Americans had launched a missile, so the radar would bounce signals into the ionosphere, where it would have a look for anything to worry about, and messages would ping back. The scientists built the enormous station, over 100m high, 700m long, launched the system but never managed to get the signals to come back to Duga. It was doomed to fail, but was a colossal project that was so powerful, using up to 10 million watts, that it interfered with radio and TV signals around the world. So, it might not have stopped the Americans launching war, but it could made Coronation Street a bit fuzzy.
It’s a beautiful sight though and I would have happily spent an afternoon photographing it from every angle. It’s such a cold war remnant; a huge installation that the Russians thought could be hidden. Even as the reactor burned, officials didn’t want anyone to see Duga, fretting over whether to let Hans Blix from the Atomic Energy Agency drive to Chernobyl and be confronted by clouds of radioactive dust which would let him know that the explosion at the plant was worse than they said or fly there, but see the secret installation. In the end he flew there, and I doubt that Duga, as massive as it is, was ever really a secret. Naturally, being a tourist site, people have put up some radiation signs near Duga, which are fake but during the day we see plenty of real ones.
After Duga, we heard towards the power station itself and get an idea of just how enormous the site is with power lines and pylons stretching out across a great swathe of land. Impressively, a solar panel array has recently been installed and a plan for the future is for more solar farms to be put across the exclusion zone. We also stop by the red forest, so called because it soaked up huge levels of radiation after the explosion, altering the colours of the trees. Almost instantly, this became one of the most irradiated places on the planet and even today, the soil is so contaminated that radiation levels are thousands of times above the norm, so we didn’t stop there for lunch.
We stopped in the Chernobyl power plant canteen for a sloppy lunch of red and brown coloured food that is bought in from Kiev and on entering, we needed to go through a radiation scanner, which is nerve-shredding. It’s never revealed what would happen if you were the cause of a terrifying alarm, so I assumed you’d just have to live in the exclusion zone forever, serving up sloppy food to tourists that haven’t set the alarms off. I don’t know how the machines work but mine didn’t beep and for that, I am thankful.
Next up was Pripyat, the highlight of the trip, because for all the drama that happened at the nuclear plant, the town that has been left to nature is more interesting than the nuclear plant, where people still work. It was over 24 hours after the explosion at the plant that people started to be evacuated, some had spent the day after the explosion relaxing in the unusually pleasant weather. One man was sunbathing on the roof of his building and was delighted at how easy it was to tan that day, and not at all disturbed that his skin gave off the smell of burning. He wasn’t aware that his tan was the beginning of radiation burns, which would slowly cause intense blistering across his body. Many people suffered the same fate and for the squeamish, looking up radiation burns is not for you.
Pripyat is not quite what it seems and I don’t think the experience could ever be genuine after such a long time and as it’s so famous. But as the minivan meets the guard in his checkpoint shack and enters the town, we immediately see the blocks of flats almost hidden behind thick stands of trees. Everything feels different, that this is not a town that bears relation to any you’ve seen before; it’s like an English garden city if the developers decided to build inside a wood and leave all the trees standing. Every so often the trees give way and a block rises up, it’s both intriguing and eerie, but not scary. If you were there at night, it’d be a terrifying place. Our first stop is the old swimming pool and our guide tells us that we can’t or aren’t supposed to go in, so advises us not to post anything on social media for a few days and takes us inside. It was hard to say if this was a trick to make us think we’re seeing something we shouldn’t be or they’re being a bit cheeky. We were told that the pool was still operating up until 1996, used by the liquidators but now you would easily think it was abandoned along with everything else. All the windows are gone, the pool long emptied and the structure is slowly decaying. Some of the group clamber up the diving board but I find myself interested in the large swimming pool sign on the floor that reminds me of the atomic logo with people swimming around it. There’s a clock still hanging on the wall but like everything here, it doesn’t work.
Later we visit and cross another group of tourists, armed with their dosimeters which aren’t making any noise. The school feels like it has been dressed for us, almost like a film set. Rows of windows frames are left open at the same angle for that pleasingly consistent look. Maybe for Instagram, a classroom floor is littered with children’s gas masks for the emotional sequence and school books are left open on pages with the benevolent face of Lenin staring out and others show soviet kids in the woods. It’s incredibly photogenic and I can’t stop snapping away. Our guides show us before and after pictures, at one point showing us that this field we were in was once the town square. Nature has completely taken over much of the city with trees bursting through concrete, turning the old sports stadium into something more like a wood. We poke around the supermarket, which once was able to have signs for luxury foods and even have the food in stock, Pripyat being such an important town in the USSR. Near the supermarket the guides get their dosimeter out and poke it near a drain. There is distinct beeping, they explain that nobody knows what’s down the drain but nobody wants to find out.
Soon, our trip to Pripyat draws to a close and we pass the checkpoint back into the normal world. We wave goodbye to the atomic dogs and I wish I’d seen some atomic kittens for the comedy effect, but you can’t have everything. I think to the future, in my nuclear bunker/nursing home where I tell people that I visited Pripyat and think of what could have been.