Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  Dennis wandered away along the side of the plaza, his detector in a lazy warble. I lingered in front of the gutted pectopah. There was nothing left but a shell of cracked concrete and twisted metal. I tried to imagine the plaza before the accident, when it had been the center of a living city. A place to meet a friend after work, maybe. Somewhere to have a cup of bad coffee. What was it like to have your entire town evacuated in three hours? To lose not only your house or apartment but also your workplace, your friends, your entire environment? I tried to imagine the terror of that day.

  But in the peace that reigned over present-day Pripyat, it was difficult. I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face. The trees and grass rustled in the wind. Insects buzzed past on their way to somewhere else. I heard the easy cacophony of the birds. And as Dennis made his way down the plaza, the chirping of his dosimeter dissolved into the birdsong, becoming just another note in nature’s symphony.

  I caught up with him at the far corner of the shops, and we headed around back to visit the amusement park. As we walked, I asked Dennis how he had gotten his job. Leading guided tours through the world’s most radioactive outdoor environment didn’t seem like a gig you would find on Craigslist. And Dennis had started early; at twenty-six, he had already been working for the Chernobyl authority for three years, alternating every two weeks between the zone and Kiev to keep his radioactive dose under the permitted limit. He told me that originally he had worked only in the Kiev office, before getting transferred to the zone. “I asked for it. I wanted to do it instead of sit in front of a computer,” he said, and took a swig of water. “And most people don’t work at all, if the computer has Internet.” Here was someone who believed that boredom was worse for you than radiation.

  He went on, recounting how he had read about a doctor who argued that constant, low-level doses of radiation were actually good for you. “The people who didn’t leave the zone after the accident lived better,” he said, referring to the several hundred aging squatters who have been allowed to live, semi-legally, in their houses in the zone. “This doctor said they had adapted to the radiation and would die within fifteen years if they suddenly leave, but could live to a hundred if they stay.”

  I had heard similar claims before, and I was doubtful. There probably were health benefits for zone squatters, but surely they came from living in a little cottage in the countryside, where they grew their own (albeit contaminated) vegetables and breathed clean (if radioactive) air, instead of being evacuated to a crappy apartment in Kiev. I suggested this to Dennis, that perhaps around here, quality of life just trumped radiation dose. He shrugged. But not everyone in Ukraine was as casual as he was about radiation. He later told me how, whenever he would visit his sister in Kiev, she would make him leave his boots outside.

  The amusement park is Pripyat’s iconic feature, an end-times Coney Island, with a broad paved area surrounded by rides and attractions that are slowly being overcome by rust and weeds. Dennis was more interested in the moss. He was a collector of hotspots, and around here the moss had all the action. Near the ruined bumper car pavilion, he waited for a reading before picking his radiation meter up from a mossy spot on the ground.

  “One point five mili,” he said, wiping the meter’s backplate on his fatigues.

  We left the amusement park and walked down the street, past the post office, past a low building that Dennis said was a technical school, past more apartment blocks. Turning off the road, we scurried through a large concrete arch attached to another building; Dennis eyed the unstable structure warily as we passed underneath.

  We continued through the rear courtyard of the building and into an overgrown area beyond. The warm shade of the forest was alive with the hum of bees. As we walked, I pushed aside branches and squeezed between bushes that grew in our way. At the end of the narrow path was a two-story building made with pink brick set in a vertical pattern.

  “Kindergarten number seven,” said Dennis.

  If you have been insufficiently sobered by the sight of a deserted city, Kindergarten No. 7 will do the trick. We came through a dank stairwell into a long, spacious playroom with tall windows on one side, their glass long since smashed out. Thick fronds of peeling, sky-blue paint curled from the walls. What had been left behind by the looters—or shall we call them the first tourists?—was strewn on the floor and coated with twenty years of dust from the slowly disintegrating ceiling. Mosquitoes made lazy spirals through the humid air.

  The door was torn off its hinges. Next to it lay piles of orange play blocks and a mound of papers printed with colorful illustrations—marching elephants, rosy-cheeked little Soviet children. A gray plastic teddy bear, its face pushed into the back of its hollow head, sat on a moldering pyre of Russian learn-to-read posters. I recognized the Cyrillic letter b.

  Dennis was by the windows with his detector. “Eighty,” he said. He walked to the far wall. “Five.”

  A toy car with a yellow plastic seat just large enough for a single child was parked in the middle of the room. It was missing its wheels and its windshield. Even it had been stripped for parts. On the floor next to it was a child-size gas mask.

  Stepping around pools of stagnant water, we made our way out through the stairwell, pausing in front of some black-and-white photographs still hanging on the wall. In them, children played and did exercises in a tidy classroom. With a gnawing temporal vertigo, I felt the pictures snap into familiarity: It was the same room. The destroyed room we had just left. And the toys the children were playing with in the photographs were the same toys we had seen just now, fossilized in dust.

  Nikolai picked us up on the street, the car appearing out of nowhere, and we left Pripyat in silence.

  The classroom lingered in my mind. I had come to the Exclusion Zone to witness its unexpected and riotous efflorescence, and there was something joyous in the sight of nature rushing into an unpeopled world. But it was a garden fed with suffering. Although the meltdown in Chernobyl was no death sentence for the people of Pripyat—and although most of the children who attended Kindergarten No. 7 are probably alive and well today—at the bare minimum it displaced and terrorized hundreds of thousands of people, and threw a pall of doubt over their health, a sickening uncertainty that will haunt the region for at least a lifetime. In this, the verdant bubble of the zone was unlike any other oasis in the world. It had been wrenched into existence, with violence. Something had created it.

  On the far side of the bridge out of Pripyat, we coasted to a stop. Dennis turned to me. “Perhaps you would like to take a picture,” he said. I was confused. Why here? But then my eyes wandered up to the horizon, and for the first time, I saw the reactor in person.

  It hunkered in the distance, perhaps a mile away, its latticed cooling tower rising over a nasty confusion of buttressed metal walls. The Sarcophagus. Officially known as the Shelter Object, it had been built to contain the shattered reactor. Floating over an expanse of low forest, it had a strange and massive presence. It could have been a crashed spaceship.

  By the time we reached the reactor complex, the day had turned itself inside out. We had heard thunder rumbling in the southeast only moments after I’d first seen the Shelter Object. Now a thick lid of clouds had slid over the sky, and heavy raindrops were striking the car’s metal roof. Our surroundings were similarly changed, overtaken by forbidding expanses of concrete and clusters of squat buildings—the infrastructure for maintaining the reactor building. Through the car’s streaming windshield, I saw a dented metal gate blocking our way and a pair of concrete walls haloed with messy helixes of barbed wire.

  On the other side of it all, attended by several spindly yellow construction cranes, was the Shelter Object. I was struck again by its great size. The interlocking metal walls rose in a colossal vault nearly two hundred feet tall, battleship gray streaked with rust, supported on one side by tall, thin buttresses and on another by the giant, blocky steps of the so-called Cascade Wall. Pipes and bits of scaffolding clung
to its battlements, whose flat surfaces were interrupted by a grid of massive metal studs. Catwalks traced the edges of its multiple roofs, and a series of tall, shadowed alcoves notched the top of the north wall, like portals from which giant archers might rain arrows down on the countryside.

  I had envisioned this moment differently. Visiting the reactor building, I had assumed, would not be fundamentally different from visiting the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal. But those thoughts vanished under the growing thunderstorm. Instead, I felt an unexpected, visceral repulsion. It was obscene. This thing. A monument to brutality, a madman’s castle under siege from within itself. And it lived. It radiated danger and fear. It had warped the land for miles around, creating its own environment, breathing the Exclusion Zone to life.

  There was a visitor center. No gift shop, but there were diagrams and photographs, and an excellent scale model of the Shelter Object. I was met by Julia, a serious woman in her forties who gave me a quick handshake before loosing a torrent of information about the accident and the reactor building. Much of it I already knew, but it took on fresh weight in the aggressive Ukrainian accent of an Exclusion Zone bureaucrat. The visitor center’s picture window gave the lecture additional dramatic punch. Through it we had the world’s best, closest view of the ever-more-menacing Shelter Object, now crowned with forks of lightning. And in case that wasn’t enough, there was an electronic readout above the window that measured our radioactive exposure—138 micros at the moment.

  “Sarcophagus took two hundred six days to construct,” said Julia. “Radiation levels at north side of building after accident reached 2,000 rem per hour.” She waved her hand over the model, a perfect replica, two or three feet tall. “On top of building they reached 3,000 rem per hour. This is appalling level. These are area where firemen were working.” I felt a little sick. Even several hundred rem can be fatal, and the first responders to the Chernobyl accident received many times that for every hour they spent on the building.

  Thunder rattled the window. With practiced ease, Julia swung open the hinged front wall of the model to reveal a cross-section of the interior, its wreckage recreated in painstaking detail. With the actual building visible just out the window to the right, the model allowed an intuitive understanding of the gargantuan scale of the reactor—and of the accident that had destroyed it. Flicking my eyes back and forth, it was as if I could see right through the walls of the Shelter Object and into the building’s guts. As Julia continued to reel off facts and figures, she lifted the roof off the turbine hall with the tips of her fingers, a colossal June Cleaver demonstrating how to use an Olympian piece of Tupperware.

  The destruction inside was complete. The core’s radiation shield, a two-thousand-ton plug of lead that had been blown into the air by the explosion, had landed on its side, and now hung precariously at the top of the core. The core itself was the size of a small building, a thick bucket standing several stories tall. It felt impossible to understand the power embodied in such a machine. A quarter ounce of nuclear fuel holds nearly as much energy as a ton of coal; the core had held more than a hundred thousand times that much.

  Now, though, it was empty. Some of the fuel—nobody knows exactly how much—was ejected in the explosion and subsequent fire. The rest melted through the floor of the reactor, a nuclear lava flow that spilled into the lower floors and basements of the reactor building, where it still sits, unapproachably radioactive. Julia pointed to a photograph on the wall that showed some of the lava, a cracked cylinder with a flaring, globular base. “This is elephant foot. Is most famous portion of nuclear lava, in basement of building.” She turned back to the model and indicated a number of tiny flags planted inside the core and around the building. “These are temperature and radioactivity sensors,” she said. “They have been placed by Chernobyl workers.”

  I was incredulous. People had actually gone into the reactor core?

  Julia nodded. “Yes. Duty cycle is fifteen minutes.”

  The idea of rappelling into the empty core made me dizzy. Julia went on, cataloging the Shelter Object’s many problems. Its walls are riddled with gaps and small cracks; if any of the corroding wreckage inside the building shifts or falls, it may spew plumes of radioactive dust into the air outside. In the meantime, the gaps in the walls have allowed hundreds of gallons of rainwater in, water that has presumably trickled down through the building and created a kind of radioactive tea that may in turn seep into the groundwater.

  Perhaps one of the worst parts of the situation, Julia offered brightly, was simply that nobody knew exactly how much nuclear material was inside the building, or just where it was, or what it was up to. Some scientists have even wondered if the trickling rainwater might be leaching impurities out of the solidified nuclear lava, slowly refining it. If this is true, it means that the fuel might one day reach sufficient purity for the chain reaction to start up again on its own, creating an uncontrolled nuclear campfire in the basement of the building. And even if that doesn’t happen, the entire Shelter Object might just fall in on itself anyway. The west wall, supported by parts of the rotting interior structure, had shifted recently, taking its first small step toward a possible collapse.

  I was ready to leave. Beneath the thunder rumbling outside, I imagined I heard a low throbbing sound coming from the reactor building. But Julia wasn’t quite finished. She was telling me about the future of the Shelter Object. Because its sheltering will essentially never be done, it’s impossible to dismantle it and replace it with something better. So first they’re going to stabilize the thing, buttressing its buttresses and supporting its supports. And then—what else?—they’re going to build a shelter for the Shelter Object. They call it the New Safe Confinement.

  “New Safe Confinement won’t just be a shelter,” Julia intoned. “It will be a technological complex.” She pointed to some conceptual drawings of the New Safe Confinement; they showed a tall arc of smooth concrete that soared over the whole mess with the same geometric élan as the St. Louis Arch. Robotic cranes will hang from its interior, in order to maintain the Shelter Object as it continues to decay. The New Safe Confinement, if it’s actually built, is intended to last 150 years. The reactor building, though, will be dangerous for millennia. So maybe there will one day be a shelter for the shelter for the Shelter Object, and then a shelter for that, and we will continue down the generations, building—shell by shell—a nest of giant, radioactive Russian dolls.

  Dennis appeared at the door—windswept and wet with rain, but still wearing his shades—and beckoned for me. Julia walked me out, talking continuously about the lack of funding for the New Safe Confinement, or even for the preliminary stabilization to keep the Shelter Object from collapsing in a heap. She emphasized that Ukraine needed international help for this, perhaps hoping that I would pass the message along to the White House or the United Nations. Chernobyl was the responsibility of the entire world, she said. Besides, Ukraine was too broke.

  Emerging into the storm, Dennis shouted, “Here you can take a photograph, and let’s go!” Pictures weren’t allowed from inside the visitor center, not that I had felt like taking one. I turned into the wind and snapped a single, rain-spattered photograph of the Shelter Object before diving into the waiting car. Nikolai floored it.

  As quickly as it had begun, the storm faded. The clouds broke as we passed the half-built forms of Reactors Nos. 5 and 6. The sun came out. A spectral curtain of steam rose from the road. Laughing at a comment from Nikolai, Dennis pointed to the vapor curling off the asphalt. “We’re joking that now you can see the radiation,” he said.

  At Dennis’s direction, Nikolai veered left and we catapulted up a gradual slope and onto a long, deserted bridge that spanned the river. This was the Pripyat River, which runs right past Pripyat and the Chernobyl reactor, and into which the cooling channel from the nuclear reactor drains. The Pripyat also empties into the Dnieper River, which runs through Kiev and is the backbone of Ukraine’s most important watershed. You
might call it the Ukrainian Mississippi, except there hasn’t been a meltdown in Minneapolis yet.

  Dennis had made this stop, I think, as a concession to my pleas for a tour of the zone’s “nice spots.” Nikolai killed the engine and we got out of the car and walked across the deserted road to the north side of the bridge. The river stretched away toward the power plant, a miniature in the distance. Dennis and Nikolai lit cigarettes and we leaned on the guardrail, staring out at the view. The wide, coffee-colored water of the river, gently iridescent with shafts of warm sunlight, rippled against a border of marshy grass and tall reeds. Beyond the tiny shapes of the cooling tower and reactor buildings, a forest of grumbling thunderheads retreated over the horizon. Peace descended again on the zone. The official part of the tour was over.

  At headquarters, Dennis and I ate quickly and in good style. The dining room was air-conditioned (the remote control for the AC looked a lot like my radiation detector), the table was covered with an embroidered tablecloth, and the meal was multicourse, with plates of meats and cheese and vegetables (not local). For the first time, Dennis took off his sunglasses. He seemed uneasy with his eyes exposed to the light, and we sat stiffly at the table, trading snippets of conversation. Maybe he was worried about missing the start of the soccer game. As soon as I told him he didn’t have to wait, he excused himself and headed upstairs.

  The game had started by the time I joined him. What I had hoped would be a raucous gathering of soccer-crazed zone workers was actually a small, somber party of five people: only Dennis, Nikolai, a pair of tired, middle-aged secretaries from the Chernobyl authority office, and me. We were well provisioned, at least, with a generous spread of vodka, cognac, cola, and some kind of pickled fish. The game was scoreless into the second half, but we found moments to toast: a good save here, a near miss there. We would hold our glasses up, wait for a few words in Ukrainian from Dennis or Nikolai, and then drink. The secretaries glared at me meaningfully before each slug of vodka: the spirit of inclusion, I chose to think.