touring the Chernobyl area on a motorbike

wish I had a permanent link, but it's a javascript window. http://www.slate.com/

I love the idea of wild horses living in old stalinist flats. However those pictures at Slate are just horrendous and heartbreaking.

http://todayspictures.slate.com/inmotion/essay_chernobyl

Has anyone visited Pripyat recently? I'm thinking of going next month if i can arrange a tour.

Has anyone visited Pripyat recently? I'm thinking of going next month if i can arrange a tour.

I keep meaning to do this but never get around to it. Has anyone been?

I can't believe I've never seen this thread. I was obsessed with that woman's site when I first found it. I've not been but I would love to go. You really should and then come back and post pics and tell us all about it so we can live vicariously through you please.

I'll see what i can do!

I visited on Saturday. There seems to be some question about how long tours to the exclusion zone are going to be run for due to safety concerns (the rather prosaic threat posed by crumbling buildings rather than radiation) and I felt that, Ukraine being a country I have a great love for and Chernobyl being such a huge part of its history, it’s somewhere I should get to while I still had the chance.

The tour operators showed the excellent documentary The Battle Of Chernobyl (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18o_X696dYw) on the two hour drive from Kyiv, helping to set an appropriate tone. Pripyat isn’t just a spooky ghost town, it’s somewhere tens of thousands of people were fatally poisoned and half a million more pitched in, at great cost to their own health, to prevent a horrific disaster becoming an unimaginable one.

28 firemen were first on the scene - all were dead within weeks. 600 airmen were used to drop bags of sand and boric acid on the reactor – all died of radiation poisoning not long afterwards. From the 10,000 Tula miners who tunnelled into the cooling tanks to prevent another explosion to the ‘bio-robots’ – reservist soldiers who were drafted in to clean uranium rods from the roof of the reactor when the actual robots found the radiation levels impossible - the heroism and sacrifice was absolutely extraordinary. That sacrifice probably prevented a second catastrophe that would have vapourised everything as far as Minsk and rendered Europe uninhabitable in perpetuity. The gravity of the historical and human context means visiting should be undertaken with some respect afforded to other sites of great modern tragedy in Europe. Quite how anyone could be crass enough to greenlight the Chernobyl Diaries is literally beyond me.

http://i.imgur.com/bfxbpI6.jpg?1

There are about 3000 people working in the town of Chernobyl, roughly 18km from the reactor, at any one time. Some, like our official guide, live there in two week shifts but most commute in from Slavutich, a town outside the zone. Most of the work is either focused on scientific monitoring or the construction of a new €1bn sarcophagus for Reactor no.4. The old one is cracking and still contains enough nuclear waste to poison 100m adults. The funding is coming from the EU, as a trade-off for Ukraine closing the other reactors which, remarkably, were still active until the 2000s. Around 150 people live in the zone permanently – illegal but tolerated by the authorities. All are elderly and either couldn’t hack city life or wanted to see out the rest of their life in their old family homes. The number was as high as 800 a few years ago.

On the way through town, we’re given a primer on the region’s history and told that Chernobyl was a majority Jewish town until WW2 and is still one of the most important sites for pilgrimage in Eastern Europe. We’re also told, in uncompromising terms, about the mutual distrust between zone workers and the Orthodox American and Israeli pilgrims who visit ever year – each accusing the other of disrespecting their respective suffering.

The first of the abandoned villages we visit, Kopachi, was considered too dangerous to leave standing due to its wooden architecture so it was knocked down and buried. The only surviving building is the brick nursery. After days of prevarication, during which many of the 130,000 people living in the Chernobyl region received fatal or life-threatening doses of radiation, the entire population was moved out with two hours’ notice, leaving anything they couldn’t physically carry behind them on the understanding that they would be gone for a week or two at most.

http://i.imgur.com/K0AeuEK.jpg?1
http://i.imgur.com/qFrRpp3.jpg?1" class="noborder">
http://i.imgur.com/yYBtkyt.jpg?1

It’ll be about a thousand years until it’s safe for anyone under the age of 18 to be allowed back.

And here’s the guilty party in the makeshift concrete straightjacket it took 90,000 people six months to create:

http://i.imgur.com/70bYSDV.jpg?1

The new sarcophagus will look like this:

http://i.imgur.com/vHiTHDz.jpg?1

It’s still too dangerous to work directly on the reactor so it’s being built on rails and will be slid into place when finished. Should be ok for about 250 years.

The heart of Chernobyl, its company town Pripyat (pop: 43,000), was just three km away from the reactor. When it exploded local people reported seeing a column of multi-coloured fire stretching a kilometre into the sky and that it was one of the most beautiful things they’d ever seen.

http://i.imgur.com/43D3aGA.jpg?1

Pripyat is huge and entirely deserted. This was the supermarket, with signs for canned vegetables and fruit still in place.

http://i.imgur.com/BkksW9L.jpg?1

The fairground was a fortnight away from opening when the reactor went up.

http://i.imgur.com/3itWTxy.jpg?1
http://i.imgur.com/a4bX3AL.jpg?1" class="noborder">

The most famous building in the city is the school, though, its floor littered with thousands of tiny, child-sized gas masks.

Despite the disrepair, it still feels like a school – signs telling students to be ‘bold and agile’ and a woodworking classroom that still, remarkably, smelled like every woodworking classroom in the history of the world 28 years after it was last used.

The music room has seen better days, however.

On the way out of the school, we were met by this beautiful creature, a glossy-coated fox with no fear of humans. You got the sense it would have eaten out of our hands, had we had anything worth offering. Rather unromantically, the guide mentioned that you can often pet foxes when they’re in the first stage of rabies as they’re as friendly and docile as domestic dogs, but I’d prefer to believe that they’ve just adapted to an environment where people pose no threat.

Although they were too far away to photograph well, we also saw a team of glorious Mongolian horses dashing through the fields of long grass. A couple of dozen were introduced as an experiment, essentially to see whether or not they’d die or have colts with deformities, but there are hundreds now and they’re going strong. The whole of the Belarussian section of the exclusion zone, as far as I can tell, is kept as a nature reserve and, given that the land will never be lived in again by people, it’s likely the Ukrainian side will follow it back to the wild over time.

The last stop on the trip was a visit to an apartment block, reemphasising that Pripyat was a thriving home to tens of thousands, not just a place for work and study. Each little flat had pretty wallpaper and furniture still standing.

A copy of Kotsiubysnky’s Fata Morgana that will never be finished:

What happened at Chernobyl was terrifying but what could have happened was so many times worse, it did make me question whether nuclear fuel can ever be considered a viable option in the long term. Yes there were design flaws and yes there was human error but the consequences of anything similar happening again, however improbable that may be, are difficult to conceive. There are probably a dozen things that could kill us first but, either way, walking around Pripyat, with its mixture of buildings declining to rubble and relics of everyday domestic life, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, one way or another, this is a glimpse of what the whole world will look like one day. As a memento mori / reminder of the transience of human existence, it’s a humbling experience.

Some of the pictures didn't link correctly so:

http://i.imgur.com/iU3dmWX.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/uEZjwU3.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/BBiEtc8.jpg?1

http://i.imgur.com/fax4D3y.jpg?1
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http://i.imgur.com/istBWX9.jpg?1

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http://i.imgur.com/GO8F4M4.jpg?1

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http://i.imgur.com/qFrRpp3.jpg?1

excellent

currently on a wikipedia trawl through chernobyl related stuff

When it exploded local people reported seeing a column of multi-coloured fire stretching a kilometre into the sky and that it was one of the most beautiful things they’d ever seen.

No pictures survived? I imagine the radiation probably fogged all the film within a pretty big radius

these are taken on top of the reactor and survived, although you can see the ionizing artifacts

http://www.jonmwang.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/bio-robots-chernobyl.jpg

As far as i know, there are no surviving pictures from the first few hours of the fire. If the radiation didn't get to the film, the KGB probably did.There was a huge effort on the part of the reactor controllers to hide as much evidence as they could from the authorities and, in turn, for the authorities to hide the evidence from the world. If you believe Gorbachev, the news that the reactor had exploded didn't reach him until after Sweden reported the fallout hitting Stockholm two days later. He knew that there had been an accident but claims that the extent was, somehow, hushed up locally.

I recommend the documentaries on YouTube, there are some images of the plant from a few days after, but the documentaries have detailed re-enactments. Sad, but this was how I learned about how a nuclear power plant works.

amazing story and photos, sv

yeah, thank you for sharing sv!

Brilliant reportage and pictures SV.

I am right in thinking that if this disaster had occurred in a nuclear reactor in say England or France rather than the Soviet Union it would have been more catastrophic because the firemen and soldiers would be more likely to down tools rather than embark on a suicide mission? I recall reading that they plied the first responders with vodka and told them it would protect them from the radiation. I need to read a good Chernobyl book because I never realised how potentially even more catastrophic it could have been.

that's an interesting thought

although a disaster of that severity like that is hypothethically much less likely in a western country, there would be severe difficulties in getting enough people to take those risks, by comparison in fukushima there were only fifty people who willingly exposed themselves to high levels of radiation, to get many thousands of people to do that is something else altogether

and if they needed specific skills like the miners to dig underneath the reactor....even if there are enough miners left in this country one doubts how many of them would be prepared to do that

apart from soldiers nobody else could be compelled to work in those conditions and more people were involved in the chernobyl cleanup than are currently in the uk military

so either paying huge amounts of money to people with the right skills or emergency legislation mandating people to work are the only options

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_50

I meant to say Am I right? obv

have you read any good chernobyl books nakch?

no i have only read internet stuff about it but the wikipedia page is good and links to other pages where necessary

the most horrifying part is the possibility (as i understand it) that the 'corium' mixture of superheated radioactive isotopes, molten concrete, ash etc would have hit the coolant water in a confined space and created a boiling liquid explosion of such power that it could have acted like the charge in a primitive nuclear weapon and created a fission explosion with the material in the other three reactors

Alexander Akimov, the unit shift chief, and Leonid Toptunov, a technician, falsely believed the water flow to the reactor was blocked by a closed valve, and so they fought their way to where they believed they could pump water back into the reactor and spent hours, submerged to the waist in radioactive water. Both would die a torturous death from radiation poisoning.Later, in hospital, Akimov tried to stand and the skin fell off his leg like a sock.

That is so horrific, fucking hell.

some other stuff on the internet disputes the claim of the soviet physicist that it could have created a nuclear explosion and it would just have been a large conventional explosion that would have spread over a wider area than the first one, although that still would have been fairly catastrophic

Great pictures SV.

I went myself, not long after this thread was initially started. Very interesting to see how it looks lately.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32488483?ocid=socialflow_twitter

"Chernobyl fox makes five-decker sandwich"

it's just carrying them away to hoard in one load, but the bbc is clickbait trash nowadays

The smoldering graphite, fuel and other material above, at more than 1200 °C, started to burn through the reactor floor and mixed with molten concrete from the reactor lining, creating corium, a radioactive semi-liquid material comparable to lava. If this mixture had melted through the floor into the pool of water, it was feared it could have created a serious steam explosion that would have ejected more radioactive material from the reactor. It became necessary to drain the pool.

The bubbler pool could be drained by opening its sluice gates. However, the valves controlling it were underwater, located in a flooded corridor in the basement. So volunteers in wetsuits and respirators (for protection against radioactive aerosols) and equipped with dosimeters, entered the knee-deep radioactive water and managed to open the valves. These were the engineers Alexei Ananenko and Valeri Bezpalov (who knew where the valves were), accompanied by the shift supervisor Boris Baranov. Upon succeeding and emerging from the water, according to many English language news articles, books and the prominent BBC docudrama Surviving Disaster – Chernobyl Nuclear, the three knew it was a suicide-mission and began suffering from radiation sickness and died soon after. Some sources also incorrectly claimed that they died there in the plant. However, research by Andrew Leatherbarrow, author of the 2016 book Chernobyl 01:23:40, determined that the frequently recounted story is a gross exaggeration. Alexei Ananenko continues to work in the nuclear energy industry, and rebuffs the growth of the Chernobyl media sensationalism surrounding him. While Valeri Bezpalov was found to still be alive by Leatherbarrow, the 65-year-old Baranov had lived until 2005 and had died of heart failure.

hadn't congratulated SV on his report (instead calling out a link he posted as trash, lol), so here: that's brilliant, SV

have been reading about this quite a bit recently

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1111093/midnight-in-chernobyl/9780593076835.html

not sure how much of this will be actually "untold" but it seems worth a read.

thanks for the rec, tracked it down. (lemme know if you want a ysi)

cheers for the offer LBI, already got this one on the kindle on my next to read list.

np!

voices from chernobyl which won a nobel prize a few years ago is very good. extremely sad book.

well Midnight In Chernobyl is definitely no voices from chernobyl. i'm surprised at what a shit writer he is - if he just stuck to what he knew it would be interesting but all the badly written scene-setting fan-fic about the chernobyl project manager's sniffing the flowers in his garden or the courtship of one of the young scientists and how his partner's eyes seemed to change colour with her mood. I've abandoned after 60 pages for now. ffs!

:(

Photographer Robyn Von Swank has a great account @vonswankcuriosities of interesting places she’s toured -in early March she started putting up highlights of her two trips to the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The photos are so, so good.

Starts here with Baba Ganya
https://www.instagram.com/vonswankcuriosities/p/Bu8GG8TgX2C/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=1kx4rf4r39s7f

I fell asleep watching ep 1 of the HBO series (and was having nightmares), and what I saw was pretty gritty and horrifying. The radiation horror and bit where one of the workers looks right into the burning core was something. It's got the reliably good Jared Harris and the cast speak in their normal accents rather stupid cod-ukranian accents thankfully. Going to try this one again later

I've been waiting for an evening or weekend when I'm in a really solid mood to start. I hadn't heard Jared Harris is in it, which sounds great.

all the resident Geiger counters only measure up to 360: "360... that is reasonable reading and it could be much worse!"

can't remember the units of radiation, but you get the horrific picture.

Like mh I'm waiting to be in a mood for this, but it's high up on my list. Very glad to hear they're not doing that awful Ukranian accent thing!

Was there any hype or anticipation for this? Seems to have come out of nowhere.

it does seem like that

finished ep 2
this show is emotionally destroying me by degrees
;_;
it is so good

Best TV thing I've seen for ages.

Listening to the soundtrack in isolation today, that lifted my mood.

Was there any hype or anticipation for this? Seems to have come out of nowhere.

My feeling is that this was a deliberate move on HBO and Sky's part. From an entertainment point of view, it does a fantastic job of making everyone forget about Game of Thrones and stop speculating about what HBO will do now its huge cash cow is gone. "We'll do this," say HBO and Sky, quietly, pushing Chernobyl at you and blindsiding you completely. But if they'd said beforehand that they were going to do that, people would have started watching Chernobyl with that in mind.

Although I could be giving them too much credit.

It's not worth much but it's worth noting that the show apparently is already the the highest rated (per imdb) TV show of all time, above the two Planet Earth docs, Breaking Bad, etc.

Yes, I feel like Sky in particular has always had something to hammock Game of Thrones to try and prevent churn on their pretty poor Now Entertainment package.

Most years has been quite forgettable; I wonder if even they knew what they had on their hands

bit insensitive to pull the cement mixer right up to the graves with the grieving widows right there! can you wait like 20 minutes, guy?

i'm sympathetic to the gessen article. there is quite a bit of heroic cornballism going on, and it would have been interesting to see more of the hierarchical deference that surely existed particularly among the apparatchiks, but it feels uncharitable. the very first scene of ep 1 explicitly dismisses the idea of dyatlov as the only, or even most responsible person. it's announcing it right up front: this is a TV drama, about particular characters, but they were not the only ones.

also her point about the shoemaker-turned-functionary feels a little undermined by slava malamud's unearthing of the photo of the actual coal minister who was... a former coal miner? NOT an office dude?

if you think this was a case of dramatic license gone mad you should see the liberties taken by that drama series gessen was a consultant on!

I really like Gessen as a writer and even though I largely disagree with that article I think the whole "this one person represents all the scientists" is a bit of a leap, plus it's a bit of a hero narrative, with a sprinkling of "if only they'd listened to the one woman" which obviously has noble roots but I'm not sure bureaucracy and idiocy on the scale of this event is more specific than the human condition.

Even before I knew the facts of that character the writing there felt a bit pushed and modish. A tiny bit. Fuck it tho, it is an amazing show.

I haven't enjoyed a HBO mini-series as much as this since the John Adams one and am quite happy to accept it's flaws and divergences from actual events.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48559289

But in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, Russia's most widely-read tabloid, Mr Muradov said his version of the show "proposes an alternative view on the tragedy in Pripyat".

I can't wait for this version where capitalist mind control undermines the integrity of reactor core..

One columnist declared the show a plot to undermine Russia's current atomic agency.

louise menschokov?

with a sprinkling of "if only they'd listened to the one woman"

I definitely saw it as a chance for them to cast a woman in a major speaking role. Which I think is something Mazin suggests in the podcast.

for sure. i can see that. i guess it might be more interesting or bold to have given her some flaws tho, imo.

i present the apex of chernobylposting - "Steamed Core" pic.twitter.com/7bIxsMQFJ8

— Comrade Valentina ☭ (@leftistthot420) June 8, 2019

for sure. i can see that. i guess it might be more interesting or bold to have given her some flaws tho, imo.

Agreed. She's not really a character at all.

Watson didn't have too much to work with but I thought the feigned accent was a bit incongruous and unnecessary, especially with mostly the rest of the cast speaking in their normal accents.

Fuck it tho, it is an amazing show.

The review that got it right was iirc the NYTimes, which basically said here's what it gets right, here's what it gets wrong, but none of that really matters because it's so good and the broader beats are pretty accurate.

Anyone listen to the companion podcast with the creator and Peter Sagal from NPR? I assume it's serious, but his voice unfortunately is pretty inextricably linked to comedy.

That's the podcast I was talking about. I agree that it's a bit weird to hear them talk so chirpily about it.

interesting we don't have a dedicated thread for the TV drama. Anyway, I gave my dad the DVD at Christmas and I'm not sure where this comes from but he insists on pronouncing it 'SHER-nuh-bill' despite that not being how anyone says it in the show. Who says it that way???

It's a strange phenomenon. I have friends who have been in Beijing for years but still somehow call it "Beizhing"

how are you meant to say it?

'Bay-Djing'?

You can try to match the sounds / tones if you like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUIaFSbQ5nc

But this is a better approximation than "Beizhing"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlHsHe1jRQk

I'm not sure my ear can discern the difference between that and the 'wrong way' other than a harder 'j' sound?

They use a /ʒ/ sound, like in "usually" - a sound which doesn't exist in Mandarin

This doesn't look very good

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/13/ukraine-wildfires-close-chernobyl-nuclear-site

"don't worry" (as long you don't live in Greece or Russia)

https://earth.nullschool.net/#2020/04/13/2200Z/chem/surface/level/overlay=cosc/orthographic=-340.70,44.22,2274/loc=30.076,51.262

The fire seems to be under control now, thankfully.

On a side note the 5G conspiracy has reached Svetlana Alekseivich:

This is the biggest challenge since the Chernobyl era. It remains to be understood that this is - is it really influenza, or is 5G already affecting the human immune system. In my opinion, scientists do not have a final conviction. There are some complex processes of further technological development - here the influence of man on the atmosphere, new technologies, and the inability of man as a biological being to sustain it all.

I've just watched this excellent show. For some reason I'm now watching the BBC Salisbury Poisonings - with Coronavirus I'm never touching anything again.