On the tourist trail in Chernobyl

I came away from the area around Chernobyl thinking that I'd seen the Marxist-Leninist answer to those tree-choked temples found in Cambodia or Guatemala, writes TOM FARRELL

THE EXPLOSIONS at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan that followed the earthquake and tsunami in March inevitably revived memories of the Chernobyl disaster.

Ironically, the Japanese crisis unfolded as the authorities in Ukraine and Belarus were getting ready to mark the 25th anniversary of the explosion at Unit IV of the Chernobyl power plant in the early hours of April 26th, 1986. And the lands around the reactor are increasingly opening to foreign visitors.

“I would say only around one in 10 people ask for reassurances,” says Dylan Harris, chief executive of Lupine Tours, a UK-based company that has been running excursions since 2007.

“Most of the people who book seem to already have quite a wide knowledge of and I guess they’ve already read up thoroughly about the risks before they decide to enquire about booking.”

My own visit began at 9am when I gathered with a group of Ukrainians and foreigners just off Independence Square, in Kiev. Our bus travelled due north for 80km through a snow-laden landscape until we arrived at Dytyaky, a village that straddles the 30km periphery of the so-called Zone of Alienation aka “The Zone”. Governed by the ministry of emergencies, it encompasses several districts of Ukraine’s northernmost Kiev and Zhytomyr oblasts (provinces) and was once home to 120,000 people.

At the 10km periphery we filed into a small block-like building to be met by our guide, Yuri. Inside the door was the first of two radiation scanning machines that, later, I would be required to step through. This one looked like a primitive Speak-Your-Weight machine; the other at Dytyaky resembled an airport X-ray scanner. On both occasions, they blinked a comforting green.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has ranked the radiation levels here as far below those liable to cause health problems, even during prolonged visits, but they are higher than normal.

It wasn’t always so, as Yuri breathlessly related to us in the upstairs museum. Even given Japan’s experience with military and civilian nuclear disasters, Chernobyl was uniquely calamitous, discharging 30-40 times as much radioactivity as the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Fukushima crisis has so far rated five on the International Nuclear Event Scale, one notch above Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania 1979), but two below Chernobyl.

Yuri pointed to maps showing the progress of the plume; Belarus got 70 per cent of the fallout and, according to some estimates, 4,000 thyroid cancers in the region may be attributable to the accident.

However, the Soviet authorities did not publicly admit that the explosion had occurred until April 28th, after the Swedes announced that their power plant at Forsmark was picking up huge levels of abnormal atmospheric radiation.

For a few extra euro, some tour groups offer the chance to hire a Geiger counter to check the levels of radiation. I could hear some of these clicking away in the seats behind me.

We drove west to Unit IV, halting near a monolithic concrete and marble monument to the 31 reactor staff and emergency workers who died in 1986. We were allowed out for a few minutes and some people photographed each other sweeping their Geiger counters over the snow.

The High Power Channel Reactor (Reaktor Bolshoi Moshchnosty Kanalny or RBMK-1000) was the workhorse of the Soviet civilian nuclear programme. But unlike Three Mile Island or Fukushima, the RBMKs lacked a sophisticated shelter to contain an explosion should the reactor’s cooling mechanisms fail.

The scaffolding and walls around Unit IV are due to be replaced by a massive shield by 2014. Yuri reminded the group that nearly 200 tons of radioactive fuel remain inside the current shield, known as the “sarcophagus”.

NEXT STOP WASPripyat, one of the Soviet Union's nine atomograds (atom cities) and once home to 50,000 workers and their families. Today, it is a crumbling corpse of a city, devoid of population, a time capsule of provincial life in the declining years of Soviet communism.

It was not until 36 hours after the explosion that the residents of Pripyat were ordered to evacuate the city. They were told just to gather their children and official documents and that they would be back within a few weeks. A quarter of a century later, none have returned.

The central square of the town was flanked by brutalist boxes of concrete, stripped of glass and with a few Cyrillic slogans in rusting steel on the rooftops.

We crossed over to the remnants of the amusement park which, to my mind, epitomised Pripyat at its most haunting and poignant. Like anyone over the age of 35, I grew up in a world that dreaded the nuclear mushroom cloud above all else. Ahead of us were snow drifted bumper cars and a huge motionless Ferris wheel. This was the landscape of the nuclear winter, the desolate world depicted in movies such as like The Day After, Threads and When the Wind Blows. According to local lore, the Ferris wheel was newly installed, due to make its maiden revolution, appropriately enough, on May Day.

Inside another building, we saw the posters of long forgotten Communist party politicians. At one point, I entered the ground floor of one of Pripyat’s 15 primary schools and found it littered with decomposing gas masks. In a former classroom, tables and desks were heaped up together as if there had been a sudden, panicked exodus.

I came away from Pripyat thinking that I’d seen the Marxist-Leninist answer to those tree-choked temples found in Cambodia or Guatemala; the abandoned remnant of an empire brought down by its own hubris. But a visit to the Zone, in an era where nuclear power and its potential risks are very much on the agenda, is as relevant as ever.

TOUR COMPANIESLupine Travel offer excursions into the Zone with additional options that include visits to ex-Cold War missile bases and tank ranges. Email info@lupinetravel.co.uk or tel 00-44-(0)1942-704525.

Panorama Tours (panorama-tours.eu) is a London-based subsidiary of Ukraine International Airlines offering tours to Chernobyl from Kiev. Tel 00-44-(0)2082831470.

PRECAUTIONSVisitors are advised not to splash in stagnant water or linger inside buildings whose interiors are exposed to the skies. It is forbidden to remove items of any kind from the Zone.

Get there

Air France, KLM, Lufthansa and British Airways fly directly to Boryspol Airport, Kiev. Low budget flights are offered by Wizz Air via London Stansted.