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It is not a journey for the faint at heart. At 6am on a grey, cloudy day in Kiev, a group of visitors board a bus headed for Chernobyl, site of the nuclear power plant disaster 22 years ago.
It is not that difficult to go on the "nuclear trip". If you are in Kiev, talk to your hotel concierge and he will give you a list of travel agencies that will arrange your Chernobyl sightseeing. Juri, night porter at the fabulous Soviet-style Hotel Dnipro in Kiev downtown, affirms Chernobyl has been drawing a lot of interest lately.
Visitors can easily book a one day-trip to the disaster site for about $300 (Dh1,100) per head, including lunch and a dosimeter for those worried about radiation levels.
The bus leaves Kiev and drives northeast through sprawling Ukrainian wheat fields and small villages. Chernobyl is a good 170 kilometres from the capital and, the nearer the bus draws, human settlements are harder to spot and increasingly sparsely populated. Suddenly the bus pulls up at a roadblock and the sentries promptly wave it to the side of the street. All visitors have to exit and enter another bus, a shabby, old mass transport relic of communist times. "The Dead Zone express," announces a guard as the slightly bewildered visitors troop in.
The Chernobyl Dead Zone is a 30-kilometre area around the destroyed reactor block. It was heavily contaminated when the reactor exploded. The dosimeter starts showing a steadily increasing reading as journey continues. "It is safe as long as we do not stay too long inside the zone," reassures Tatiana (26), a guide of state agency Chernobyl Interinform, which now "manages" the disaster site.
Tatiana has been taking foreign visitors to the site twice a week. She readily admits doctors have told her that a greater frequency of visits could pose a health risk. The job pays. Tatiana earns one-and-a-half times more than other government officials of her age in Kiev.
The Dead Zone is nuclear wasteland: the trees are yellow, the grass is brown. Black-and-yellow signs warn of nuclear hazard on the fields. The experience is unnerving as much as the scene is surreal. A Hollywood director shot on scene for Return of the Living Dead: Nekropolis in 2004.
The abandoned nuclear plant finally appears in the distance, sitting ponderously on the edge of an artificial lake. There are four reactor blocks. Block Number 4 was the one that blew up in the early hours of April 26, 1986. Today a big concrete shelter covers its remains but some 200 tonnes of highly radioactive material are still feared hidden within. The concrete shelter was hastily put in place in the wake of the disaster and is only a temporary solution. A new, stable confinement structure is scheduled to be built in 2011, Chernobyl Interinform states in a handout distributed by Tatiana.
"Don't put anything on the ground", she says as the visitors leave the bus and stand dismayed in front of the block. It is a huge, deformed and wicked sculpture. Fissures show up on the concrete's surface. Water is bubbling down the dirty walls.
"Don't stay too long here. Take your pictures; look at the dosimeter," Tatiana urges the group.
Radiation alert
Sure enough, the device shows a contamination of more than 1,500 microroentgen some 50 metres away from the broken reactor.
Ten is the average natural radiation reading close to the earth's surface. Air travellers in a long-distance jet flying at 10,000 metres have to endure up to 30 microroentgen. But standing in front of Reactor Number 4 is like being soaked in radiation from an enormous, invisible microwave oven. "We have to leave now," Tatiana reminds five minutes later. The average lethal dose of radioactivity is 500 microroentgen in five hours.
The bus drives to Pripyat, a former workers village, now turned into a ghost town. The abandoned communist-style concrete buildings are interspersed with debris. Inside the devastated Palace of Culture, an old, yellowed Pravda newspaper lies in the dust. Its date shows April 25, 1986. The residents of Pripyat had been preparing for Labour Day celebrations on May 1 when all 48,000 inhabitants were evacuated 36 hours after the disaster. Nobody ever came back.
Former residents have created a website (www.pripyat.com) that serves as a grim reminder of the disaster and its aftermath.
The silence is overwhelming as the bus heads back to civilisation through the curious, post-apocalyptic landscape.
Meltdown: What went wrong
On April 26, 1986, at 1.23am local time, Reactor Number Four of the four-block Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Memorial Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station was shaken by a massive explosion after an unsuccessful test operation aimed at shutting down the reactor. Human errors have been blamed for the fatal accident.
The cooling system of the reactor failed, causing an enormous steam explosion followed by a nuclear meltdown triggered by burning graphite.
Firefighters arrived shortly afterwards. They had not been informed about the danger of radiation and tried to extinguish the flames without any protective clothing. All of them died shortly after the mission.
A radioactive cloud had soon spread from northern Ukraine over Eastern and Western Europe and even as far as the North Atlantic. The first warning of the nuclear fallout came from Sweden and not from Soviet sources, which tried to camouflage the catastrophe as long as possible.
As an immediate result of the disaster, about 300 people died from radiation sickness. Several thousands died years later, especially the so-called "liquidators", mainly Soviet volunteers who tried to clear the nuclear mess. These volunteers have since been referred to as the "Heroes of Chernobyl". Many of them are buried at a cemetery in Moscow. Altogether, the disaster inflicted a death toll between 50,000 and 70,000 people, including those who came down with radiation-related diseases and cancer. There are no totally reliable sources, though.
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