Chernobyl

What an interesting day yesterday. A trip to Chernobyl and associated sites. I had thought it might be “gimmicky” somehow, based on how it tends to be advertised, but it turned out to be an excellent and informative tour. Just by coincidence, 4 nuclear engineers were on the trip with us, so we didn’t worry about the radiation levels because they obviously didn’t. On a side note, their being there made me realize how very integrated Europe is now — they were respectively a Finn, 2 Swedes, a Slovak, and had worked together in the past at a site, I think in Sweden, and a friend/former colleague had just moved to work at Chernobyl so they were now all visiting the Ukraine. But I digress….

On the way to the site our guide gave us a detailed overview of the accident, and safety briefing, including a long list of dos and and don’ts. Which included no straying from paths, no entering buildings except for a very few specific ones that had been decontaminated, don’t touch things or pick anything up, don’t pat any dogs or cats you might see, don’t sit down on any walls or benches, don’t put purses or backpacks on the ground, don’t eat any food you may see growing (mushrooms, apples), and so on. We had already been warned by the tour company that we had to wear long pants, long sleeves, hats, socks, and closed-toe shoes. Personal Geiger counters were available as well.

There was top security around access as well. We had had to provide passport info before leaving Canada, and our passports were checked to a list by guards as we entered and exited what they call the 30-kilometre zone and the 10-kilometre zone. We also had to pass through personal radiation detectors, rather similar in look and size to those airport body scanners, at three separate sites as we toured inside the 10-kilometre zone. Our mini-bus was also checked for radiation levels at various checkpoints.

When we got to the town of Pripyat, where the Chernobyl reactors are, it was like walking through a ghost town. Apartment buildings, public buildings, a theatre, a sports stadium, a school, all in various stages of deterioration and showing signs of being abandoned in a hurry.  We were always walking through forest, looking at these buildings among the trees, and as we walked more and were shown before-and-after pictures in various places, we realized that nature was just taking back what had been a treeless town 32 years ago.

We also learned that the nuclear reactor called Chernobyl was originally named after Lenin but, after the accident, the USSR did not want his name associated with it and they quickly renamed the reactor after the local area.

The on-site radiation was explained to us in some detail, and the tour guide did pay close attention to this during our time in the zone. We were surprised that some of the radiation was extremely localized, for example a whole school building shell might be very low radiation, but the tour guide was able to show us a tiny spot, just a few inches, where the Geiger counter went “off the map”, and this was because when the site was decontaminated somebody missed a tiny bit, the same way you sometimes miss a teeny tiny muddy area when you wash your car. We also saw, from a safe distance, the local hospital where, right after the disaster, the clothes of about 30 firefighters who were first on the scene when the reactor blew were piled in the basement. The basement was subsequently filled to bury the clothes in concrete and sand, but 32 years later those buried clothes are highly, highly radioactive.

We were surprised to learn that the nuclear site has not been abandoned, as we had assumed. The reactor that blew up is completely encased in a “sarcophagus” but there are three other reactors, all now being decommissioned. About 500 engineers and nuclear workers, from all over Europe, are involved. They are bused in every day from outside the 10 km zone, and because of the radiation exposure each of them can only work 15 days on the site. They estimate everything will be completed by 2029.

We were staggered by the huge loss of life associated with trying to contain and decontaminate the site, immediately at the time of the disaster and then subsequently over several years.  It’s hard to find words to comment on the scope of the disaster.

I will post pictures from our tour, but you may see them tomorrow as I have bad bandwidth at present.  Hope everyone is having a good day!