It’s March 2019, and I’m sitting in my apartment in Mykolaiv flipping through my Lonely Planet Ukraine guidebook, looking for an adventure to coincide with my Peace Corps medical checkout, which would be my next-to-last trip to Kyiv before my service ends. Of all the places I want to see, it’s Chernobyl, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, that ultimately lures me in.
During my physical, and oddly enough, while Dr. Valery reviews my history of thyroid issues, I mention with excitement that I plan to conclude my weekend with a tour of Chernobyl. “Why?” he asks, looking at me like I’m out of my mind. “It’s very dangerous.” I don’t know, I shrug. I tell him I’ve done some research and found one’s radiation exposure is about equal to an x-ray in a dentist’s office. “Lots of people go,” I concluded. “How could I spend 27 months in Ukraine and not go to Chernobyl?”
As usual, I’m staying at the Dream House hostel in Kyiv’s old Podil district. It’s Orthodox Easter weekend and glorious spring fever has burst upon the scene invigorating people, plants and birds alike. On Friday, April 26, I start the day with a coffee and espresso and a leisurely stroll to the Ukrainian National Chernobyl Museum. And would you believe, it’s the 33rd anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and entry is free. How nice. I’m first in line as the museum opens, eager to soak up all things Chernobyl.
Although it’s a small museum, the three exhibition halls have plenty of interesting information to keep me gripped for two hours. As I move from one exhibit to the next, I try to remember 1986. I was a freshman in college. I wonder, did the magnitude of the disaster fully register with my 20-year-old self then? I peruse the old media archives and recall how the Communist party officials delayed news reporting and tried to hide the accident. But the tragic story of the “liquidators” (first responders) is what really astounds me. Some of the first ones on the scene to put out the fires and clean up the toxic mess were exposed to radiation levels as high as 160,000 chest x-rays. Over 100 liquidators quickly developed radiation sickness, and 34 of them died from it.1 All in all, the museum gave a detailed and honest account of the tragedy. It was a great precursor to visiting Chernobyl, and although somber, made me even more excited for the next day’s tour to the Exclusion Zone—the 20-mile radioactive area surrounding the plant.
On Monday, I get up bright and early to catch the city bus from Podil and head to Independence Square in downtown Kyiv for my 8:00 a.m. check in with the SoloEast tour guide. I’m early enough to grab a coffee and Danish. I get a seat on the back of the charter bus and settle in. As it fills to capacity, I engage in small talk with a group of grad students from the UK. They’re pumped and their enthusiasm gets me energized too. One of the guys says, “Man, I can’t wait to see Chernobyl.” Everyone concurs. “When we get back to Kyiv tonight, I think I’m gonna get right pissed.” Yes dude, that’s the spirit! We rumble across the bridge over the Dnieper River, taking in expansive views of the sprawling Ukrainian capital. We reach the highway and our guide explains what we can expect once we get to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. She presses play on the BBC documentary we’ll watch en route — Burying Chernobyl. It’s a fascinating video detailing the 20-year construction of the behemoth New Safe Confinement structure built to encase the original, crumbling sarcophagus hastily built to contain the extreme radiation coming from melted reactor No. 4.
Gazing out the window, I’m calmed by the dense, green woodlands surrounding the mostly empty rural road to Pripyat. We pass lonely village homes with chickens in the yard. A man fishes from a river. A woman wearing a headscarf tends her garden. Although they were forced to evacuate after the explosion in 1986, I can understand their desire to return to such a beautiful, tranquil place.
We arrive in Pripyat, the town built to house Chernobyl workers and their families. Security officers board the bus to check our passports. Once cleared, we proceed to make several stops, exiting the bus to get the first of many photo opportunities. The first is the Pripyat 1970 monument, commemorating the founding of the town. I was just four years old then. Nearly 50,000 people lived there at the time of the accident. Today it’s a ghost town and will remain uninhabitable for 20,000 years.
We go to a former elementary school and a hospital. In random places, yellow warning signs point out radiation hot spots, and dosimeters start going crazy. Our guide sets her stopwatch for 10 minutes. In certain areas in the zone, time is limited as radioactivity levels are still high. Inside the school, desks are still in place and books from the day are strewn about among broken window glass. Even more eerie are the omnipresent mutilated dolls that, though most likely staged, conjure the nightmare of the 1986 disaster and the residents leaving everything behind in the subsequent evacuation.
Strolling through the abandoned, deteriorated city, we come to the famous amusement park, with the iconic Ferris Wheel and bumper cars, frozen to a standstill in rust and overgrowth. Everybody jockeys for the perfect shot. Our guide holds up a photo album of pictures taken during Pripyat’s heyday of its football stadium, the convention center hotel, the yacht club and the Palace of Culture. The city built to be the model of Soviet Union ingenuity and modernity now looks post-apocalyptic with nature taking over.
Back on the bus, we travel three miles to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The New Safe Confinement structure, taller than the Statue of Liberty, dominates the landscape. It looks like a gargantuan silver airplane hangar and gleams in the sun. When it was finally moved into position, inch-by-inch on rails, it became the largest object ever to be moved on land by humans. Just outside the structure, we get pictures taken in front of the reactor shelter. Here, our guide sets her timer for only 7 ½ minutes.
After a full day of seeing the key sights, our final stop is the zone’s exit checkpoint. Everyone files into a room to get measured for radiation exposure. No one alarms and we’re back on the road to Kyiv.
Yes, seeing the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster was strange, very interesting and maybe a little risky. It was proof positive of nature’s resilience. I was glad to cross that experience off my Ukrainian bucket list. And now, every time I get an x-ray, I think of Chernobyl.
1 (Saplakoglu, Yasemin. 2019, May 27. “How Did Radiation Affect the ‘Liquidators’ of the Chernobyl Nuclear Meltdown?” Live Science.)