Chernobyl 30 years after

Today we had the opportunity to visit the "Zone" around the Chernobyl nuclear plant which caused a world shocking disaster 30 years ago. We were two of more than 600 visitors today. Probably close to 100,000 visitors will go there this year and they come from all over the world. The monument above was put together by local folks to honor the firefighters who came right after the explosion to do what they could (which was not much, but their call to duty made their life afterwards very short). It also offers the clean-up folks (thousands of them) who did the initial recovery and clean-up work as well as the medical staff who assisted them. Most of them did not live long to tell their stories....

The initial metal & cement hull the soviets erected around the exploded plant #3 was a rush job and would only last 30-40 years. Afterwards the world stepped in and engineers from all over the world did an incredible job constructing a huge hull around the disaster site. It was finished in 2017 and inside robot cranes and tools have now begun to dismantle the damaged reactor (because otherwise it would pose a danger during another 2,000 years or so). I can recommend a recent HBO documentary on this work; the engineering done was amazing.

While the radiation nowadays is very low, the initial radiation during the days and weeks after the reactor explosion made living in a radius of about 30 kilometers impossible. We walked through the city which was built by the soviets as a "city of the future". It turned out quite different and the buildings are starting to be taken over by nature again. The disaster happened on April 26, 1989, just a few days before the annual May 1 Labor Day celebrations. The amusement park was going to be officially opened that day. It never opened....such a sad sight.

The building with the Olympic pool is another sad reminder of how terribly wrong things went in the community erected around an ambitious nuclear power project which was not well designed and poorly managed. The world was shocked but also learned valuable lessons for future nuclear power generation plants. Most of the engineers and technicians who worked in the plant had young families with children. The two photos below of a deserted child care center are a reminder of that.

What a humbling day this was. So much food for thought. Also so much learning on what was done afterwards by tens of thousands of people to contain the disaster. The good, bad and ugly all in one day at a distance of just two hours driving from the 7 million city of Kiev....