Ukraine 2017: Pripyat

[iguana]

I visited Ukraine for five days in December with Emily and Tim, with a two-day tour of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone booked in the middle. Here's what we got up to on the second day in the Zone!

The Red Forest and the Bridge of Death

We had breakfast in the hotel (similarly to the dinner the previous night, also massive); this included a dried fruit drink called kompot.

We re-entered the 10km zone immediately and spent the rest of the day within it. Approaching Pripyat our Geiger counters started alarming inside the minibus; we were driving through one of the high radiation corridors that indicated the direction the wind had blown some of the radioactive material after the explosion. To our left was the Red Forest, a name given to it after all the pine trees died, leaving only the red-brown timber showing. It remains one of the most radioactive places on Earth.

Signage for the Red Forest. A railway line behind the sign runs parallel to the road and leads to the Bridge of Death.

We did not stop the minibus until we were through here; indeed we didn't stop until the official edge of Pripyat where a sign stood, though the city did not reach anywhere near this at the time of abandonment. Just after the sign was the Bridge of Death; people watched Reactor 4 burning from here, which was apparently multicoloured and quite attractive, unaware they were receiving a lethal dose of radiation in doing so.

We would have been able to see Reactor 4 from here, but it was quite misty in the morning. It was 2km away.

Pripyat buildings

The overgrown fields and forests gave way to buildings and we were in Pripyat. We got out to have a look around. Our guide noted that we were here early enough that single-day tours would not be here yet, and neither would the police, so we should be able to look inside the buildings. Technically this is illegal, but our guide seemed to have a good sense of when the police would be around, and was occasionally on the radio with our driver who seemed to be scouting around in the minibus. We suspect that there's some unspoken agreement that if the tour groups don't do anything stupid then the police won't search the area too thoroughly.

Entering the buildings is illegal, incidentally, not due to radiation (levels are usually lower inside buildings since contaminants didn't settle inside as much) but due to structural instability. Some of the older buildings in town had started to collapse, but the newer ones, as we'll see, were still safe enough -- they were built only thirty years ago, after all. The penalty for trespassing is permanent ejection from the Zone and a fine.

Our guide had some photos taken when Pripyat was new, as promotional photos, and we visited the sites of a lot of these photographs.

The first building we entered was the gym, which had been used by resident liquidators (people who worked to remove contaminated material) until the late nineties.

Basketball court

The Azure Swimming Pool; it looks like some graffiti has been added between the 2009 photo on Wikipedia and a 2012 photo on Flickr (that whole photostream is fascinating to me; barely anything has changed in five years; I even photographed some of the same dolls).

The next building we visited was a school; in one main hall hundreds of practice gas masks for the students had been dumped on the floor having been checked for any metals to be looted.

Teacher's register. Final registration looks like 28/4; though Pripyat was evacuated on Sunday 27 April 1986 so I may be misreading it. Paper seems to hold up very well indoors, even with windows absent.

Obligatory creepy doll.

Next up our guide gave us the choice of climbing a 9-storey building or a 16-storey building. Naturally we picked the taller!

The lifts were out.

From the roof there were spectacular views of the city, which had been built as a model city to show off Soviet town planning to outsiders. It was high-rise with space around each block of flats proportional to the height of the block. We'd have been able to see the reactor from here on a clearer day. As it was, the landscape faded into mist around the city, like an underperforming video game.

Finally, an old theatre:

Pripyat Amusement Park

Naturally we went to probably the most iconic place in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone: the amusement park. The park was due to be opened at the start of May; the town was abandoned before then, so it lacks the Terminator 2 nuclear explosion mental imagery. A few people did get to test the machinery before leaving, and it hasn't been moved since, except for one group of idiots who managed to get it to rotate around one car's worth recently.

The cars, like most metal in the area, are some of the most radioactive places in Pripyat. Here our guide's Geiger counter is reading over 10 µSv/h.

Bumper cars.

A new (within last five years) mural showing wildlife returning to the area. Hammer and Sickle logo on top of the building in the background.

Reactor 4

Reactor 4, the one that exploded, is now covered in a new structure, the New Safe Confinement, which has considerably reduced the level of radioactivity; my Geiger read 1.09 µSv/h compared to over 5 µSv/h in Veritasium's Chernobyl video (which is worth a watch) before the structure was moved into place.

the New Safe Confinement.

The old sarcophagus was a bit more interesting to look at, so we didn't stay here for long. It's difficult to get a sense of scale; the New Safe Confinement is over 100m tall and the black shaft going up the side in the photo above is a stairwell.

We had lunch in the worker's canteen and once again, despite being promised only very basic food, got treated to a massive lunch.

From top left, clockwise: shredded cabbage and carrot, mashed potato and some kind of omlette/coated meat (the guide swapped this for mash and apple slices upon realising it wasn't vegetarian), borscht (Ukrainian beetroot soup; delicious), and sweet cream-cheese pancakes. Kompot and a lemony fruit juice for drinks.

Reactor 5

Reactor 5 was in the process of being built when Reactor 4 went up, and was then never finished. It's located in the middle of a cooling pond, which had frozen over, and was only accessibly by walking along the construction railway bridge to it. It was rusted and beautiful.

We went inside.

The reactor core would have been here.

We also walked along a railway ("try to step only on the [concrete] sleepers, not on the gravel between them") to Reactor 5's cooling tower, which was by a wide margin the most unsettling place on the tour for me.

We went inside while daylight was fading; it was dark with water dripping and echoing around the chamber. Our Geiger counters would periodically alarm.

Here was the highest reading I saw on a Geiger counter during the trip, nearly 33 µSv/h. The guide knew exactly where the spot was but to anyone else it just looked like a patch of mud at the side of the path.

Holiday Park

Our final destination was a holiday park, established on the shores of the cooling lake. The road to it had long overgrown so we walked through the woodland along a path made by other tour groups. Light was really fading now, we moved around abandoned buildings with Soviet rip-offs of Western cartoon characters painted on the sides; and swings that could no longer be sat on.

The cartoons were definitely not creepy.

Not creepy at all.

Checking out

It was time to leave the exclusion zone, but in order to do so we had to pass through two checkpoints, one for the inner exclusion zone and one for the outer. Both had rather ancient-looking radiation scanners that everyone had to get a green light from before being allowed to exit the area.

I didn't get a photo but here's a link to one of the outer checkpoint on Wikimedia. As I understand it these were checking for alpha and beta radiation as well as the gamma radiation that our Geiger counters were there for.

We were all fine and were allowed to leave.

Our Geiger counters had been monitoring our radiation dose for the whole 32 hours we were in the Exclusion Zone. All three of ours measured 8 µSv each. That's a little over the dosage from a dental X-ray, and probably less than we received on our flight back to the UK from Ukraine.