The enduring fascination of Chernobyl and Pripyat -- now with package tours.

Disaster Tourism: Holidays in Chernobyl is a Deutsche Welle documentary about an unlikely form of tourism.

The business in post-radioactive tourism is booming. The accident at the Chernobyl power plant in 1986 was the worst nuclear disaster in history. So what’s it like there today? Is it deadly silent? On the contrary. Thousands of tourists flock to the scene of the catastrophe every year.

Tour operators in Chernobyl are expecting more than 100,000 visitors in 2019. Tourists from all over the world come to take a tour of the ghost towns and learn more about the consequences of a nuclear accident. The organizers insist the area has been extensively cleaned up in the last few decades, so a brief stay shouldn’t pose any risk, but some areas are still heavily contaminated. Chemistry graduate Serhij Myrnyj was responsible for radiation monitoring after the accident. Today he is the biggest provider of tours to Chernobyl, trying to improve the region's reputation and boost the economy through tourism. He now wants Chernobyl to receive UNESCO World Heritage Site status and so open up new prospects for the region. For the tourists, the trip to the restricted area is a unique experience, but for others it’s a tough existence. Former resident who returned home illegally after the evacuation live on the contaminated land here like recluses.

The updated sarcophagus containing the stricken reactor's lethal core is built to last 100 years, but the radioactivity itself will be with us for 100,000 years.

The City the Chernobyl Disaster Left Behind, Then and Now, by Darmon Richter (Atlas Obscura)

Archival images of Pripyat before the accident offer a stunning contrast to what visitors will find today.

Built to house the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, by 1986 Pripyat was a thriving atomgrad. Schools and kindergartens, a cinema, palace of culture, swimming pools, river port, and a respectable selection of shops and cafés—all these amenities served the city’s young populace, by then numbering nearly 50,000 residents. New administrative districts were under construction in anticipation of further growth. Pripyat offered a standard of life above and beyond that of many contemporary Soviet cities, so much so that, “to men and women born in the sour hinterlands of the USSR’s factory cities… the new atomgrad was a true workers’ paradise,” as Adam Higginbotham explains in his recent history of the disaster, Midnight in Chernobyl.

The city of Pripyat stood in the front line of that disaster—just a couple of miles from the ill-fated plant—and now, in the 33 years since the last human resident left, nature has reclaimed it ...

Chernobyl: "Three new books reconsider the impact of the worst-ever nuclear catastrophe."

It was a minor concern at the time. I'd be visiting Eastern Europe in 1987 and traveling in the general vicinity of Chernobyl. It wasn't being flippant to ask: what's the real fallout from the nuclear disaster?

After all, the USSR was hardly "open" at the time. There was no way of knowing how accurate the official reports might be.

In the end I said to hell with it and followed my wanderlust. Thirty years later the memory came to a brief reference.

It’s strange what you remember, and what you don’t. The train came to a stop in Warsaw well after 9:00 p.m., and we congregated on the plaza in front, waiting for our guide and the bus to the Hotel Nowa Praga.

There was a women dressed in peasant garb, standing behind a rickety wooden table by a shoddy cement wall. She was selling admirably healthy strawberries, and none of us had Polish złoty to spend on her wares.

Barrie didn’t ruminate. Taking stock of the situation, he produced a few dollar bills that she happily accepted as illegal tender in honor of the wonderful Mr. Reagan, depleting her stock to nothing.

Then Barrie grandly announced the reason for her bountiful crop: Undoubtedly these were Chernobyl strawberries, fertilized with the fallout from the nuclear disaster the previous year.

We ate the nuclear strawberries, each and everyone, laughing all the way to the hotel.

Then, and now:

Loth to sacrifice production targets, Soviet planners ordered slaughterhouses to mix radioactive and clean meat to make sausages. The Soviets were not alone in circulating poisoned wares: Greek wheat contaminated by the fallout was eventually blended into consignments of aid shipped to Africa and East Germany. Even now, Ms Brown joins pickers in the forests of northern Ukraine who combine “hot” and clean berries so the crop meets radiation requirements for exports.

The Economist's review of three books about Chernobyl is elegiac and economical, proper words harnessed to sentiments for mulling over a stiff drink. Kudos to the author.

The tragedy of Chernobyl (The Economist)

Three new books reconsider the impact of the worst-ever nuclear catastrophe

... The weather was unseasonably warm on that fateful Saturday, and Pripyat was in a festive mood. Locals planned to attend weddings or to stroll into the idyllic forests they had come to love. An engineer who arrived in 1971 described the surroundings reverently: “Silence and a sense of primeval creation.” Then the safety test scheduled for that morning went tragically wrong. Anatoliy Diatlov, the plant’s deputy chief engineer, called the ensuing meltdown “a picture worthy of the pen of the great Dante”. While monitors in Sweden picked up radiation just hours after the explosion, it took the Soviet government three days to release a terse statement: “There has been an accident at the Chernobyl atomic-electricity station.”

Views of Pripyat and Chernobyl from a drone.

We've all been here before.

From Chernobyl to Fukushima Daiichi in no easy lessons. (2011)

Though not with drones. Pripyat was a purpose-built "nuclear city," and now lies in the center of a man-made dead zone.

A drone's-eye view of CHERNOBYL: Eerie footage reveals a city left to decay after devastating nuclear disaster, by Ellie Zolfagharifard (Daily Mail)

• Pripyat was just miles from the Chernobyl plant which exploded in 1986
• Drone footage was captured by Devon-based filmmaker, Danny Cooke
• He used a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter, a Canon 7D camera and a GoPro3+
• It shows haunting views of abandoned fairground rides and buildings
• 'There was something serene yet disturbing about this place,' said Cooke

... Tourists may obtain day passes, and some workers who are rebuilding parts of the site are allowed in for limited hours only each month. Scientists say the area will not be safe to live in for another 20,000 years.

From Chernobyl to Fukushima Daiichi in no easy lessons.

As we await the outcome of the situation at Fukushima Daiichi, quite a few observers have been thinking back to Chernobyl, which occurred 25 years ago next month.

The Long Half-Life of Chernobyl, by Felicity Barringer (New York Times)

... There are sparks of recognition that drive home the similarities, too — for example, the selflessness of the Japanese plant workers laboring in the radiation danger zone, described by my colleagues Keith Bradsher and Hiroko Tabuchi in Wednesday’s newspaper.

Personally, as I try to filter lessons from these two differing, but still similar instances of present-day mankind poisoning mankind's future, the book "Annals of the Former World" by John McPhee keeps tugging at my attention.

The book is about geology, mainly, and my reading group tackled it last year. One of the points that has stuck with me is mankind's general inability to fathom deep time. Obviously, evolution makes no sense if God created the world 6,000 years ago. It assuredly does in the context of millions of years of time, during which continents can move great distances, and yes, apes can turn into people.

Deeper time is what it will take to make places like Chernobyl safe again (go here for recent photos), and yet as a society, we still demand and take environmental shortcuts every day, even when we know better. The firemen in Japan and the Ukraine knew better, in the sense of duty posing clear hazards, and they did their jobs, anyway.

I wonder when the little people in all of us will understand that sort of impulse.

http://villageofjoy.com/chernobyl-today-a-creepy-story-told-in-pictures/