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My Chernobyl Adventure
I’ve been trying to visit Chernobyl for about six years. In the summer of 2015, while working in Saudi Arabia I arranged a quick four-day visit to Kyiv. When looking for things to do I came across a Chernobyl tour. It sounded fascinating, and I booked a tour. Unfortunately, I messed up my dates and thought it was on the second day after my arrival, and it was on the first. Due to the paperwork and permits with the Ukrainian government, I missed my chance. Fast forward to spring 2020. I again booked a trip to Kyiv and this time a two-day tour. And, Covid shut down all travel two weeks before my trip.
Finally, with an airline credit expiring, and travel relatively easy, I rebooked for September. This time I made it.
I order to visit Chernobyl you have to book a tour, and they submit your passport and information to the government who arrange your pass into the Exclusion Zone, the 30 km radius area around Chernobyl that was evacuated after the 1986 disaster. A second inner 10 km zone includes the most contaminated area. My two-day visit started out in Kyiv where I met my tour guide Serghyj and the other four members of the tour, two Dutch, an Aussie, and an Austrian.
We were all given a dosimeter to wear at all times. Our guide also gave us our rules. Long sleeves all the time, no eating or drinking outside the vehicle. Don’t sit on the ground. Don’t lay your backpack or camera down. Try not to touch anything. He also told us “you can’t go into any buildings because of safety”. Damn. Then he said, ” but when you go into the buildings just make sure I’m not in the picture.” We were also cautioned to be quiet, and he was careful to take us to buildings where we wouldn’t be seen easily from the street, to try and avoid any police, unlikely, or Karens, more likely.
We arrived at the first checkpoint about 80 km from Kyiv and were processed. Much scrutiny of our tickets and passports. No photography was allowed at any of the checkpoints.
We drove from there into the Exclusion Zone, and passed the inner 10km checkpoint, making our way to Chernobyl town. There we were taken to some of the buildings, including the town hall where the trial of the Chernobyl operators was conducted. It’s an eerie location. A modern-day Pompeii where life just stopped on April of 1986.
200,000 people were evacuated from the 2,600-sq-kilometer area, almost none of which returned. A memorial to the towns and villages is now located in Chernobyl listing all the names of the now ghost towns. We visited the fire station with a memorial to all the first responders, and then had lunch in a hotel in the zone. That afternoon we visited outside the reactor complex seeing the half-completed cooling tower for reactor #5. Chernobyl was planned to ultimately have 12 reactors making it the largest nuclear facility in the world. Just reactor 4 produced enough electricity to power Kyiv. Five and six were in construction when the accident occurred. The cooling tower was the first time I saw significant levels of radiation. I brought a Geiger counter for the trip. Background in Kyiv was about 12 microREM/hr. In the exclusion zone, it averaged about 29, and when we got to areas inside the cooling tower we were up to 401 microREM/hr.
We then proceeded around the exterior of the reactor complex. The four reactors are all officially being decommissioned. Every weekday, nuclear fuel is transported out under extreme security provisions. We were told the decommissioning won’t be complete until 2065. Seven thousand people work in the Zone, 2,500 at the power plant. We toured around the outside of the facility and visited a memorial to the “Liquidators”, the hundreds of thousands of workers who were involved in the cleanup after the accident, many getting extreme doses of radiation that killed them, shortened their lives, or caused lifelong health problems.
We then proceeded to the town of Pripyat. It was built specifically for the people building and operating the power plants. It was one of the most desirable places to live in the USSR. It also had one of the youngest populations of any city, with an average age of only 23. Almost exclusively filled with young families. We visited the elementary school first, which was strewn with dolls, books, posters, even beds for naps for the youngest students. Truly creepy to see.
Other stops included the Police station, which had a surprising number of cells for such a small police station, the community swimming pool, and a 15-story apartment building which we climbed to the top to get a panoramic view of Pripyat. The apartments were small, most one bedroom, one bathroom, and a kitchen/living area. Spartan by our standards but luxury in the USSR.
A highlight for me was the Hospital. Still jammed with medical gear, old bottles, exam tables, bedpans. I can imagine the chaos there, with radiation poisoned patients pouring in, and no equipment or medication to deal with them. The basement (now sealed off) has a room where the firefighting equipment was dumped, with extremely high rates of radioactivity. It’s the most dangerous place in Pripyat itself.
The day ended at the amusement park, with the iconic Ferris Wheel. The park remained me of any number of small carnivals I went to as a child. (Picture taken with my drone.)
We retired to our hotel in Chernobyl where we had dinner and called it a day. The next day, while most of the group went to Pripyat again, I and one of the Dutch on the tour were taken to the power plant for our tour. This was truly the highlight of the trip for me. We met our guide, Julia who worked for the IAEA, were given another dosimeter and outfitted with protective clothing. Hat, jacket, respirator, gloves, and shoe covers. She then took us on our tour.
We started in the bunker, a nuclear shelter at the time, now the “safe room” for the plant workers in case of a radiation emergency. It was the location of the conference room where the first attempts at dealing with the accident were made, and the calls to Moscow. We went through a radiation detector and past security with much scrutiny of passport and ticket. From there we entered a corridor that is over a kilometer long which goes past each of the reactor control rooms on the right and reactors on the left, starting with Reactor 1, the oldest, through to the wall of Reactor 4. We stopped in an active control room where electrical power is still routed from Chernobyl to the Ukrainian power grid. While no power is generated since 2002, the transmission lines are still key for the national grid.
From there we walked to the control room of Reactor 3, the twin of Reactor 4. Unlike the first 2 reactors, the soviets decided to economize and built the 2 reactors in essentially 1 large building. Control room 3 still contains all the equipment which was used to control the reactor.
Located in the control room is the infamous “A zed 5 ” button , intended to SCRAM the reactor but on that fateful night, due to the inept operation of the reactor and a known design flaw in the control rods (Soviet corner-cutting at its finest), instead became the detonator for the explosion.
From there we proceeded to the computer room, which monitored the status of all the computers in the complex. It reminded me of the finest 1960s US computer equipment. Julia told us it was capable of giving the operators a printed update every two minutes on the reactor status. Two minutes is an eternity in a nuclear reactor. Beyond that we went to the end of the corridor, a walled-off area that lead to Reactor 4. We had to hustle in this area as the radiation was hotter there then anywhere else on the tour. On the wall to Reactor 4 is a memorial to Valery Khodemchuk, the only person directly killed by the blast whose body was never recovered. His family returns every year to memorialize him.
Bottom right near the wall is a pipe that leads from Reactor 4. That was where I found the highest radiation readings of the tour. 4.1 milliREMS/hr, hundreds of times higher than background levels 29 MICROREMs/hr. We hustled by on our way to the turbine rooms to see the gigantic power turbines, and finally headed out of the building. More radiation detectors, another security checkpoint, doffed our gear and turned in our site dosimeter. We were taken to an out building where we were shown videos of the construction of the new containment building, truly an engineering triumph. We left and I rejoined my tour.
Our last stop on the tour was the Duga Radar complex, known as the Duga Woodpecker for its tapping noise on a number of radio frequencies. A gigantic over-the-horizon radar to spot incoming US ICBMs, we visited the control rooms and receiver, the transmitter being kilometers away. Lots of conspiracy theories about the Duga, many Ukrainians either blame the explosion on the radar itself, or that the reactor accident was a coverup for the radar complex which cost billions and may not have worked as planned. Some real tinfoil stuff.
That was it, we proceeded to head back to Kyiv. We made one more stop, scattered around the Exclusion zone are random hot areas, just spots where the radiation is significantly higher, and it was impractical to try and clean the thousands and thousands of locations. so they just mark them.
Well. All in all a fascinating 2 days. Glad I was able to finally experience it. Kyiv itself was a beautiful, vibrant city, full of beautiful churches, museums, and endless parks. Ukraine has been independent now for 30 years, so an entire generation has grown up identifying as Ukrainian and not knowing the oppression of the Soviet Union. I believe, at least in the Western half of Ukraine, that this will make it extremely difficult for their Russian “neighbors” to swallow the entire country.
Great post!
Do you know how many people ended up dying due to the Chernobyl disaster?
Hell yes! It’s been quite a while since he’s picked one . . .
The official Soviet count was 30. Which is ludicrously low. Kyiv National Research Center for Radiation Medicine puts it at greater then 6,000. The Ukrainian government is paying 35,000 families for “owing to the loss of a breadwinner whose death was deemed to possibly related to the Chernobyl accident.”
I don’t think we will ever get the real numbers.
Thanks James. Looks like it will be hard to beat but with the excellent Ricochetti writers out there who knows?!
I wonder how their covid-19 stats look. :-)
It was surely much lower than most people would have expected, given the anti-radiation sentiment globally.
I am an advocate for much higher allowable radiation limits than we have currently – it is clear that there are “good” amounts, especially when balanced against other “goods.” Nobody died of radiation in Fukushima (many died from the evacuation). In a famous bomb test in the 1950s, the residents of the nearest town in Utah had no higher subsequent death or cancer rates.
Similarly, the cancer rates of naval personnel on nuclear ships is not higher than those on non-nuclear ships.
Hmm. What does that remind us of?
I was fascinated by the HBO series, thanks much for the travelogue, Kojak. Er, Kozak.
The school images are the creepiest.
As the kids say: I’m totes jelly. What a cool experience. Thanks for the photos and the write up.
Not only is the Chernobyl part interesting, but also a look inside the spartan existence in a supposedly powerful communist society –
So, when I was in the military in 1989 a Soviet pipeline exploded, and burned hundreds of people on 2 trains. The US offered help. Initially the Soviets were, “no need, we got this”. A couple of weeks later they, changed their tune and wanted help, but only some doctors and technicians. The burn unit at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio sent a team to help.
When they got there, they called back and said “send everything”. So the AF flew giant planeloads of equipment from burn dressings to ventilators to hydro therapy tanks. I talked to the guys when they got back. They were shocked at how primitive the Soviet treatment for those people was. They had a couple of East German ventilators, for show only as they didn’t know how to operate them. Patients had to be fed and have their dressings changed by family or they stayed in the same filthy dressings for weeks. They had reusable IV equipment which was an infection control nightmare. They were doing some weird treatment where they used pig kidneys to “filter” patients blood and re-infuse it.
The consensus from the guys who went was, ” if we have to fight these guys we will kick their ass.”
Not long after that our Air Force and the Russian Air Force did an exchange with a public open house. It was amazing to go on the flightline and see migs. The base gave them a tour of the base. Part of it was though base housing. The Russians were stunned to see nice enlisted housing with nice boats. I will and some flightline pictures once I find them.
I wonder if the medical facilities in Moscow for senior party members and their families were that bad.
I love reminding lefty acquaintances who extol Cuban medicine that when Fidel got cancer, he flew to Europe for treatment in a top Madrid hospital. The guy who literally owned the whole medical system in his country left when he got sick.
But, you know, “tax the rich”. Because #CommunismWorks.
Fascinating stuff. The passage of time symbolized by the availability of tours of the biggest nuclear accident site ever is reflected by the change in attitudes toward nuclear energy.
Apropos this, Biden’s Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has signaled a return to pro nuclear energy policies in the US government.
“Nuclear is a key technology for Member States as they aim to lower their emissions, grow their economies, and ultimately combat climate change in a truly sustainable way,” she said at the beginning of an international meeting on nuclear energy.
There is an increasing realization that renewable energy won’t be adequate to support first world economies or allow for the continued development of other countries. Nuclear is the only sustainable emissions free technology that can provide adequate reliable energy.
Good luck to them on that, but I doubt they can get past their own people. Nuclear energy is one of the early examples of lawfare; any attempt to build a plant will face an endless series of lawsuits that will make it take decades and be too expensive to build. They have to overcome forty years of their own propaganda.
Gee, and all it took was the people who did the math telling them so for the past 25 years.
Lawfare can’t go forward without funding, and the funding may be drying up.
Not that simple. Lefty groups have big, big bucks. There are also provisions in environmental law that permit government reimbursement of legal fees for suing government—even if government wins the suit. Large, rich, politically-connected law firms offer resources pro bono. A win or even a threatening long battle with bad PR against a large corporate defendant can be lucrative. We are nowhere close to defunding lawfare.
And … Chernobyl may make future history as well?
Chernobyl’s Blown Up Reactor 4 Just Woke Up
If I were conspiracy minded, I would say this was just so Kozak could get Post of the Week.
I heard from an FBI guy that the servers in Kozak’s apartment in Trump Tower are directly connected to shady types in Ukraine. Kinda surprised the FBI has not already swooped.
Good job of explaining what may be going on….
You guys are just toooooo funny! (Is there a emoji of LLLLOL?) I just woke the dog up
I wiped down the server in my bathroom with a cloth.
James Comey told me I was good to go.
[Deleted after reading post #49 by @OldBathos]
Many years ago I remember a young Russian or Ukrainian girl who wrote a diary of her journey through the exclusion zone. It really is a fascinating example of what happens when humans abandon an area and the effect of higher levels of radiation on normal animal life.
Ukraine reports just over 104K deaths or 2.423/100K
Russia reports 347K deaths or 2.376/100K
For comparison the US is 962K or 2.878/100K and China is 4,626 deaths or .003/100K
No one believes the Chinese numbers
I have been wondering if it isn’t time for another “post of the week.”