"To put that in perspective, international standards generally recommend that members of the public do not receive more than 0.1 rem from artificial sources in an entire year, and standards such as the U.S. Over time, its urban landscape became overgrown with trees and vines.Įven so, Lyman notes, air dose rates ranged up to 0.01 rem per hour in Pripyat on the day of the explosion – hundreds of times the normal background rate. The area was evacuated because of high radiation levels, and Pripyat, once a thriving city of 50,000, including many workers at the nuclear plant, was abandoned. The site of this eerie scene was a place called Pripyat, located near the heart of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a circle with a radius of nearly 19 miles (30 kilometers) around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that suffered a catastrophic accident April 26, 1986. As they went through their drills, a special radiation control unit monitored the levels to which the soldiers were being exposed, as this Reuters dispatch detailed. They roamed through a deserted city, firing their guns and launching grenades and mortars in the shadows of abandoned, decaying buildings, some of which displayed the old hammer-and-sickle symbol of the defunct Soviet Union. In early February 2022, as Russian troops massed on the Ukraine-Belarus border a short distance away, Ukrainian soldiers trained for the confrontation that was to come. The plant is now “out of service and all four of its reactors are due to be dismantled by 2064”.īohdan Borukhovskyi, Ukraine’s deputy environment minister, told the broadcaster: “This is a place of tragedy and memory, but it is also a place where you can see how a person can overcome the consequences of a global catastrophe.This rusting Ferris wheel in an abandoned amusement park in Pripyat has become an iconic symbol of the nuclear disaster of April 26, 1986. “Vegetation and decay has taken over much of the surrounding area,” Sky News reports. “All of the buildings in Pripyat, a ghost town that was once home to 50,000 people mostly working at the plant, are in need of repair,” The Guardian says, with Tkachenko saying that the popularity of the HBO show Chernobyl may prompt an increase in the number of tourists wanting to visit the site. The explosion of the fourth reactor also spread contaminated material across much of western Europe, with thousands more dying of radiation-related illnesses such as cancer in the following years. Thirty-one plant workers and firemen died in the immediate aftermath of the 1986 disaster, mostly from acute radiation sickness. “The importance of the Chernobyl zone lays far beyond Ukraine’s borders… It is not only about commemoration, but also history and people’s rights,” he said. “We believe that putting Chernobyl on the UNESCO heritage list is a first and important step towards having this great place as a unique destination of interest for the whole of mankind,” said Oleksandr Tkachenko, the Ukrainian culture minister. In an announcement timed to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the disaster today, Ukraine hopes that the assignment will “draw funding and more tourists” to the “mothballed nuclear power station surrounded by wasteland, rubble and abandoned buildings”, The Guardian reports.
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