View all Photos: ( View Album | View Slideshow* )
(* I recommend you deselect ‘Embiggen small things’ from the Options menu in the top right for best quality)
I can’t help but stare at his gun; I’ve always had a lust for weaponry. I feel a mischievous urge: it’s the same urge that makes me want to shout in libraries or throw things at actors at the theatre; something in me just wants to see what would happen. I rarely act on these urges, but they do fill me with a kind of perverse glee. I want to grab the gun and fire it; to hear the crack of the bullet leaving the chamber; to smell the exquisite odour of spent gunpowder; to feel the power of life and death in my hands.
I daydream a little. Surely grabbing the service weapon of the military-fatigued, ultra-stern, permanently frowning, Ukrainian Border Guard at the outer edge of the Chernobyl Nuclear Exclusion Zone would not end well. I contemplate the likely sequence of events and conclude that making a grab for the gun would almost certainly result in me getting riddled with bullets and having my bleeding corpse tossed in to the pristine snow like a bag of old rubbish. I decide against it.
While I’m pondering this, there is a torrent of Russian going on between our tour driver and the border guard. Neither of them speak a word of English, nor can we converse in their native tongue, so Nathan, Ben and I are having a hard time keeping up with the unfolding situation. They’ve pulled the three of us off our tour bus and the guard is comparing our passports to a piece of paper scrawled with Cyrillic letters and symbols we can’t even begin to decipher.
After some deliberation, “Nyet!” barks the guard, “Hotel. Kiev.” He waves his hand and abruptly walks back to the small building, slamming the door closed loudly behind him. We’re mystified: what’s happening here? Do they want to speak to our hostel? Were we supposed to follow him? While we’re scratching our heads, our tour bus suddenly also departs and disappears off down the road leaving the three of us standing alone and confused in the snow and ice thirty kilometres from the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history and a million miles from anywhere else. It starts snowing again; we look at each other. Fuck.
Abandoned at the Border
The weekend had started well; upon arriving at our hostel they’d immediately given us a beer and a large glass of vodka served from a bottle with a pump-nozzle attached (Note: this is one of my favourite ways to be welcomed). We confirmed our Chernobyl tour for the following day, paid our money, and set out for a night on the town.
Walking the streets of Kiev is like stumbling in to a city-wide fashion show; some combination of Soviet genetics, nuclear fallout, and the second-world scarcity of Kentucky Fried Chicken has resulted in a nation of supermodels. Not only that, there seems to be a serious shortage of men; everywhere we went it seemed to just be us and a room full of stunning women stealing glances in our direction. Regretfully, through some cruel twist of fate, none of them spoke even the tiniest amount of English, so our attempts to start conversations were met only with big smiles and general confusion. So much for the language of love being universal.
After many pints of Ukrainian beer, several shots of Nemiroff vodka, and some ice-cream we’d found while on a drunken midnight mission for cream doughnuts, we found ourselves sharing a table with two Russian girls visiting from Moscow who seemed delighted to be talking to three strapping young men. After several more unnecessary vodka shots with the womenfolk, a paper dart throwing competition, and a brusque telling off from bar staff for flinging airborne projectiles in every direction, we staggered back to our hostel and set an early alarm for our tour in the morning.
I awaken sweating, with a thumping headache, and the urge to vomit; bad things happen when you start doing vodka shots in the mid-afternoon. I open the window and let the cold air blast against my face, but I already know it’s not going to be enough to stave off the forthcoming rebellion of my body. I dash to the bathroom. After purging my stomach of the remainder of last nights efforts the three of us go and stand outside and wait to be picked up for our tour. All I want to do on the bus is sleep or die, but the driver plays terrible pumping euro-pop at maximum volume for the whole three hour journey to the Chernobyl border which makes any kind of rest an impossible goal.
Now on top of what already a rather unpleasant journey, we’ve been abandoned in the middle of a frozen wasteland without any real idea of why or what to do now. I hope the woman at the hostel might be able to act as an interpreter and find some resolution to our predicament, so we rap on the window of the guard booth and make a phone gesture to the guards sitting inside. They look at us with unmasked loathing. One of the men reluctantly opens the window and I hand them a small piece of paper containing the hostel’s number. He fondles the paper for a moment then says something to his colleagues which causes an outbreak of raucous laughter, then he hands the scrap back and slams the window closed.
Warning: Radiation
We’re now a little panicked: it was -9°C in Kiev and is markedly colder out here, plus a biting wind has picked up which only serves to rob us of what little warmth our bodies are generating. We’re all shivering, the guards are openly hostile towards us, and none of us have mobile phone reception; we’re genuinely starting to fret about the unpleasant four or five hours that lie ahead until our tour bus comes back in the other direction and I’m already quietly thinking about hypothermia. We’re about as isolated from civilisation as it’s possible to be and the only living creature that wants anything to do with us is a lone Alsatian guard dog who is looking to get her belly rubbed. We oblige.
With few other options, we make our way to a small shelter half a mile down the road. It has an open face and contains only a small broken bench, which hardly makes it an improvement over standing on the open road, but at least we’re away from the menacing stares of Border Patrol and it does provide a little protection from the icy winds.
Nathan starts sprinting up and down the road to warm up. Ben is noticeably shaken and starts using language that is not typical of himself and far too profane to quote here. I get out my mp3 player and a small speaker and chuck on some Pearl Jam; if we’re going to freeze to death I figure we might as well die with a soundtrack.
We’re at a loss for what to do. Ben thinks he might have had a single bar of mobile reception back toward the border, so he starts patrolling back and forth trying to capture an elusive signal. Nathan tries to wave down the occasional passing car with little success. I get out all my camera gear and start screwing around in the snow. Hell, there is nothing else to do.
Nathan finally has some success waving down a car; a beaten up old Lada with silver tinted windows rolls to a stop. The driver winds down the window letting a great cloud of thick smoke escape in to the frigid air. The man is wearing full camouflage gear, has greasy slicked back hair, and all gold teeth. “Americans?” he asks with a sinister smirk. We all look uneasily at each other, from the vibe he’s giving off he might as well have said “Would you like to get robbed and beaten?” We wave him on. He sneers at us and pulls away.
Meanwhile, Ben has finally had some success getting some mobile signal and manages to get through to the girl at the front desk of the hostel. “Oh, we’ll send someone to pick you up.” she says nonchalantly, “Wait where you are.” Um, sure. Where else would we go?
The Road to Chernobyl and the Radioactive Forest
After a very chilly couple of hours waiting by the roadside and having each done numerous star-jumps, press-ups and furious sessions of jogging on the spot, a car finally rolls up and out pops what I can only describe as a Russian version of Bruce Willis. He looks all business: big leather boots, an animal skin jacket, a chest the size of a barrel, plus a few gold teeth of his own. “Come my friends!” he exclaims with a wide grin and shepherds us in to his car. The warmth makes us all a little giddy.
Our saviour puts Nathan on the phone with the owner of the tour company who apologises profusely for screwing up our entry permits and by way of making amends, offers to put us up in a hotel an hour or so from Chernobyl and will organise for us to have our own private tour the following morning. Furthermore, he says he will personally collect our belongings from our original hostel and then collect us from the Chernobyl border after our tour and will deliver us to the airport that afternoon. From seeming like an complete failure not a half-hour before, our visit to the Ukraine suddenly looks like it might work out all right after all.
Our accommodation is what appears to be some kind of hunting lodge set alone alongside a barren stretch of snow-covered road. The interior is all stone and wood and lined with all manner of taxidermied critters in an assortment of staged positions. Ginormous antlers hang from every wall and comprise the legs of most of the tables; a large stuffed beaver stares blankly at us next to fake pond of stagnant green water; a giant eagle hangs from the ceiling; a wild boar stands outside the window.
We retire to our quarters for an afternoon nap only to find more dead animal decorations scattered around the rooms. It’s beyond me how anyone would come to the conclusion that a mounted weasel would make a nice ornament, but evidently it’s all the rage in these parts.
We return to the main restaurant area later that evening to find it transformed. Now the display of death is accompanied by a furious laser show, a smoke machine and a device occasionally spurting out a cloud of bubbles. Two skinny Ukrainian men in shiny shirts are belting out power ballads to a circle of bopping women. Once again, we are practically the only men in the place.
Ukrainian Chic: Hotel Room Deluxe
The English dinner menus of Kiev are long gone, so Nathan resorts to making mooing noises and drawing a picture of a cow much to the amusement of the bar staff. Unfortunately they don’t have beef, but somehow we convince them to order on our behalf as we cannot even begin to understand the Russian text on the laminated pages in front of us. We eat a kind of deep-fried chicken schnitzel; it’s not great, but we’re thankful at least that it’s not beaver or weasel.
The following morning, as promised, we are collected by our own personal tour guide. He has a serious facial tic; his chin seems to move completely of it’s own accord. He tells us he lives in Chernobyl, well inside the exclusion zone, and suddenly the tic makes perfect sense. We collect a Geiger counter for measuring radiation levels and head towards the power plant.
The Chernobyl nuclear power facility was built in the wooded marshlands of northern Ukraine, approximately 80 miles north of Kiev. It’s first reactor went online in 1977, the second in 1978, third in 1981, and fourth in 1983; two more were under construction. A small town, Pripyat, was also built near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant to house the workers and their families.
On April 25th 1986 Reactor Four was shut down for routine maintenance. During the shut down, technicians were also going to run a series of tests to determine whether in the event of a power outage the turbines could produce enough energy to keep the cooling system running until the backup generators came online.
Pripyat
To get accurate results from the test, the operators turned off several of the key safety systems which turned out to be a disastrous decision. Just after 1am on April 26th the reactor’s power dropped suddenly, resulting in a critical situation. The operators tried to compensate for the low power condition, but they lost control of the core and at 1:23am the plant suffered a catastrophic explosion which destroyed the reactor housing, tore the roof off the building, blew out the walls, and sent a mile high column of debris and nuclear material in to the atmosphere.
Had the safety systems had have remained on, the explosion would not have occurred and the problem easily rectified, but unfortunately they were not and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power facility was now on fire and spewing huge quantities of radioactive material in to the sky. In a last ditch attempt to contain the situation, the panicked engineers rushed to flood the lower levels of the plant with water; this would prove to be a another terrible mistake.
The loud explosion rattled the houses of nearby Pripyat and the following day the billowing cloud of radioactive material coloured the morning light. Soviet officials downplayed the situation and told the citizens of Pripyat there had only been a small accident, that everything was fine and they should carry on with life as usual, leaving their own citizens blissfully unaware that radiation levels many thousands of times their usual levels enveloped the city.
As the core continued to burn in the open air over the following days it released massive amounts of radioactive particles in to the atmosphere which formed an immense cloud which spread with the winds up over the rest of the Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and eventually two days later on April 28th, operators of the Swedish Forsmark nuclear power plant in Stockholm registered unusually high radiation levels near their own plant. When other plants around Europe began to register similarly high radiation levels, it became apparent a major nuclear disaster had occurred somewhere on the continent.
Pripyat Amusement Park
Initially the Soviets denied any knowledge of the situation, but due to the mounting evidence they eventually had no choice to concede there had been an incident at Chernobyl. Despite knowing there was a major disaster on their hands, the USSR reported only to the world that one of the reactors had been “damaged.” American spy satellites showed otherwise.
Scientists from all over the USSR flew in to the Ukraine to try and find a resolution to the problem and extinguish the inferno. The discovery that the lower levels had been flooded with water made it apparent they were dealing with a very serious situation: if the burning core breached the reactor floor and hit the water it would trigger a nuclear explosion many, many times bigger than the world and ever seen and the resulting radiation would render much of the European continent uninhabitable for centuries.
Something had to be done fast; there was no way of telling if or when the core would burn through to the lower floors, but if it did the results would apocalyptic. The only way to clear the water would be to send divers in to the lower levels of the facility and open the purge valves. The extreme levels of radiation would make this a death sentence, but there was simply no other choice.
Two soldiers bravely volunteered and swam down in to the murky depths. The temperatures were boiling and the visibility practically non-existent, but they managed to open the valves and release the water. In the years that followed it was discovered that the core had managed to burn it’s way through the concrete floor and indeed the actions of these two valiant men saved the world from death on a scale unseen since the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Ben at Pripyat
It took them two weeks to finally extinguish the blaze, but the area was still heavily radioactive. A team of workers set about building a concrete and metal ’sarcophagus’ to entomb the core, but by the time the disaster had been contained 56 people had already died and more than 4,000 of the workers died shortly after.
Another 70,000 have since been “disabled” by radiation and about 3.4 million people, or 7% of the Ukraine’s population, are considered “affected” by Chernobyl; thyroid cancer, for instance, has become remarkably common. Most of the deaths remain without official acknowledgement.
Our old beat-up car scrapes against the ice as we drive around the Chernobyl plant; evidently these roads are not well used. We stop a short distance from Reactor 4, but we’re not allowed to walk about too much due to lingering pockets of high radiation. Our Geiger counter is beeping already and we’re only too happy to obey. There is now some new construction surrounding the original sarcophagus as it started leaking again several years ago. We stay for only a short while.
Pripyat, the town built to house workers and their families of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant, was once a gleaming jewel in the communist crown, but is now eerily silent, overgrown and destroyed. Nature long ago started reclaiming the land and trees and plants are slowly taking over the concrete and metal. We walk through an abandoned theatre; props and sets still lying all around. We walk on through an amusement park with bumper cars and Ferris wheel; you can easily imagine what the city would have been like when people lived here in the days before it became a nuclear wasteland.
It’s hard to compare a holiday like this to visiting the beaches of Thailand or travelling through Africa, but a part of me feels it’s important to see the less glamorous side of human existence, as well as the good. I feel drawn to see Auschwitz in much the same way as I felt compelled to visit Chernobyl. As human endeavours progress at an ever faster rate, I think on some level we assume all technological progress to be inherently positive, but disasters like Chernobyl make us step back and re-examine the way us and our societies live.
Pripyat
Albert Einstein, who’s General Theory of Relativity ultimately lead to atomic power and the atomic bomb, never forgave himself for his part in the eventual bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II and no doubt would have been equally horrified by the events of April 1986.
With the populations expanding and the demand for energy ever increasing, nuclear energy is the most common choice to meet these needs. Anti-nuclear advocates claim reactors are a prime terrorist target and complain about nuclear waste which remains radioactive for thousands of years, but really, do we have any other option? Compared to burning fossil fuels like coal and natural gas, nuclear is really a much more ecologically sound option. It is my hope that one day soon sustainable technologies such as wind and solar power will become viable on massive scale, but for the foreseeable future, nuclear power is not going anywhere. Let’s hope that we’ve learnt our lessons from the past and disasters like Chernobyl never happen again.
View All Photos: ( View Album | View Slideshow* )
(* I recommend you deselect ‘Embiggen small things’ from the Options menu in the top right for best quality)
