It used to be that the exclusion zone was closed to ordinary people—reserved for scientists, journalists, and others with special access. But that is not the case now. Tour buses regularly come to Chernobyl to visit the radioactive area. You can also get special individual tours through web sites such as http://www. ukrainianweb. com/chernobyl_ukraine. htm#Chernobyl. All tours are managed by the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Ukraine and are highly regulated.

Yuri picked me up at my apartment in Kiev and we drove to the Dnieper River pier to pick up a Danish couple who were on a river cruise and wanted to see Chernobyl. We drove through the countryside and small villages for an hour and a half or so until we arrived at the checkpoint to the 30-kilometer exclusion zone where we met our guide, Maxim Orel. He likes to joke around but he also has a dark, cynical side. The Chernobyl accident and the lack of faith in the authori­ties to tell the truth about the accident have left their psychological mark on the Ukrainian people.

The first stop is a newly built museum that is not very informative about the actual accident and is mostly a shrine to the people killed in the accident and to children. Similar to the very misleading Chernobyl Museum in Kiev, it implies that far more children died or suffered gross abnormalities than is the actual case. Maxim told me that 120,000 people had already died within the first 10 years after the accident, presumably quoting the very misleading Greenpeace study. I set him straight on the scientific analysis of the expected number of deaths.

Outside the museum is a concrete slab representing the 30-kilometer exclusion zone with another smaller slab on top of it representing the 10-kilometer exclu­sion zone that has higher levels of radiation. There are bases in the concrete to plant signs for each of the 90 or so villages that have been evacuated. Signs with the names of the villages with a line through them form a long lane on past the concrete slab. It is sobering.

We are in the town of Chernobyl (Chornobyl in Ukrainian), about 15 kilo­meters from the nuclear plant. Maxim said it was a Jewish settlement of 30,700 residents since Jews could not live nearer than 100 kilometers from certain cities in Soviet times, and Chornobyl is about 120 kilometers from Kiev. The Stalinist forced starvations of the early 1930s and the Nazi holocaust had decimated the Jewish population. By the time of the accident, there were about 14,000 residents in Chornobyl. There are no permanent residents now, only workers who cycle in and out to keep their doses below the maximum limit—though Maxim didn’t know what the limit is. The workers are environmentalists, scientists, and admin­istrative personnel who are needed to run the place and do scientific studies. Maxim had a handheld dosimeter and I measured the background radiation at around 0.23 |aSv/hr—nothing to worry about (equivalent to 2.0 mSv if you were there for a year).

There are 113 self-settlers in the exclusion zone. These are people in their sev­enties to nineties who decided to come back and live out their lives in the old villages. The government provides them with electricity and basic essentials. They get monthly medical care and can get emergency medical care also. They will die in their old homes, happy to be there but cut off from normal society. They won’t die from the radiation but from old age.

We left Chornobyl and stopped at a site storing Japanese robots that were used after the accident to try to deal with the disaster. They only worked for a few days before the radiation disabled them. We also stopped at a memorial to the firemen who died fighting the fire spewing from the damaged reactor. These were the 28 people who died early on from acute radiation effects. They were the true heroes of Chernobyl.

As we continued our trek toward the reactor site, Maxim said we could not enter the buildings in Pripyat because the authorities changed the rules a few months ago—too dangerous for people to be in the buildings, not from radiation but general safety hazards. So we stopped at Kopatchi, a little village that no longer exists except for a kindergarten that still stands. The building is falling apart, with parts of the ceiling coming down and the floors covered with junk, and you could see children’s playthings, beds in a dormitory, old lockers, alphabet letters in a pile on the floor. It is what you might imagine if a kindergarten were abandoned very suddenly and over time it was ransacked—exactly what happened. The dose rate inside the building was about the same as background in Chornobyl but outside it was much higher. I walked around the building and it was around 5 pSv/hr. As we were leaving, Maxim showed us a spot that had been a play area with some old toys gradually decaying away where the dose rate was 40 pSv/hr—about 350 mSv if you stayed on that spot for a year.

As we approached the reactor, Maxim emphasized that the authorities rather arbitrarily keep various sights and even pictures off-limits. “It is not allowed” is a favorite expression. We stopped at a distance from the nuclear plant site and took pictures of reactors 1 and 2 that continued to run for several years but were deactivated on President Kuchma’s orders. Two reactors were in a single building with a smokestack and cooling tower. The deactivated reactor building was cov­ered with rust but presumably has been properly shut down with the fuel removed and put in a cooling pool. The French were building a storage facility for han­dling the spent nuclear fuel—the building was opposite the road from our viewing site. Pictures were not allowed. After spending 300 million euros, the project was abandoned. Maxim did not know why and said it is dangerous to ask questions about such things.

We drove on to a parking lot and observation point near reactors 3 and 4, which were also in a single building. One side looks relatively normal and contains reac­tor 3, which continued to operate until 2000. The other side is the destroyed reac­tor with a sarcophagus (shelter object) covering it. There is a memorial at the site and you can get good pictures of the reactor. The sarcophagus was clearly made haphazardly and is leaking—hardly surprising, given the extreme condi­tions at the destroyed reactor when it was built to encase the holocaust. It was not built to last forever and it certainly won’t. According to Mary Mycio, water leaks through cracks and forms pools inside with more than half as much water as an Olympic-sized swimming pool (16). Maxim said the dose rate inside is 3,000 R/ hr. I asked him about a model of the destroyed reactor showing the elephant’s foot—the melted slag heap of nuclear fuel and who knows what else pooled on the floor of what remains of the reactor—and he said you needed special permission to see that and it takes a day and a separate form. He made phone calls to try to get us in—unsuccessfully because there was a group of scientists and engineers touring the site already.

Right next to reactor 4 is the ongoing construction of the New Safe Confinement (NSC). According to a 3D-CAD model video we saw in the museum, the NSC will be a huge arch 108 meters (354 ft.) high with a span of 257 meters (843 ft.) and 162 meters (531 ft.) long. It is being built in sections on huge towers and will then be slid forward on huge concrete rails to cover the destroyed reactor. Once it is finished and in place over the sarcophagus, it will have the capability to remotely disassemble the panels and beams that constitute the sarcophagus, with the eventual goal of decontaminating the site. It is designed to last for at least 100 years, though it may last much longer. Work seems to be pretty well advanced, with the large towers built and several of the sections of the arch seemingly com­pleted. It is being built by Bechtel, EDF, Battelle, and KSK (a Ukrainian subcon­tractor). Maxim says it is now scheduled for completion in 2015, and that seems pretty realistic from what I saw. He said it is forbidden to take pictures—why that is so is not at all apparent, since it doesn’t appear to be a secret at all. Maxim says that the authorities are taking pictures of everyone, and the tour guides can get in a lot of trouble if they try to bend the rules.

Leaving the reactor site, we headed to Pripyat. On the way we came to an inter­section that was at the edge of the Red Forest, a 4.5-square-mile pine forest that was directly in line of the worst fallout from the reactor. From this single van­tage point the pine trees appear to be mostly gone and a birch forest has taken over. That would be like the natural succession of a pine forest that burned to the ground. In reality, the pine trees of the Red Forest were bulldozed down and bur­ied and pine trees were later planted, but they are stunted by the still-high levels of radiation. The birch trees are much less sensitive to radiation, so they are out­growing the pines. The whole exclusion zone is covered with trees and grasslands as it reverts to the wild. Fall had not yet arrived, so few of the leaves had their fall colors yet.

We are in Pripyat, the abandoned town that used to be a high-end town for the young nuclear workers and their families. The town was built in the 1970s solely to support workers at the reactor complex. The afternoon after the accident, the workers were told to pack their things for a few days, but of course it turned out to be forever. That was done to prevent panic, supposedly. These were the lucky people who got potassium iodide pills, which probably prevented a lot of thyroid cancers among the children. As you drive up the promenade to the main town square, the trees growing everywhere obscure the buildings along the street. The town square was a large concrete open area with a couple of fountains that now have trees pushing through the concrete and small ponds in the former fountains (Figure 10.2). Moss grows along cracks in the pavement. The moss is somewhat more radioactive than the general area—I measured doses of around 2 qSv/hr (18 mSv/yr) in the plaza. The large building on the far side of the plaza was the Cultural Palace where theater productions were held, as well as a bowling alley and other entertainment options for the residents. It is falling apart. We were able to go inside part of the theater, even though “it was forbidden," where you could see the stage lights fallen to the floor and posters of communist officials, including Lenin. It was surreal. The whole area is reminiscent of a Mayan jungle taking over the ancient ruins of the people. That is exactly what is happening here and on an amazingly rapid time scale. After all, the accident only happened 27 years ago and already Pripyat is a wild forest. Trees grow through concrete and pavement and up through buildings. It is fantastic!

We walked to the Amusement Park where the famous Ferris wheel stands as a stark monument. It was never used—the Amusement Park was supposed to open on May 1, three days after the accident. A merry-go-round is nearby—rusted

relics of the man-made disaster that was Chernobyl. Near the bumper car arena filled with the skeletons of rusted cars is a hot spot where the dose rate was 200 ^Sv/hr—an amazing 1.6 Sv/yr.

We drove down old streets through the forest to the swimming pool. It is sur­rounded by forest and flowers. All of the huge windows surrounding the building are broken, but you can go into the swimming pool area that has intermediate and high dive platforms. There is a ruined basketball arena and on the upper level were rooms with ferns growing in cracks along the walls—nature taking over. Next we drove to the high school and toured the abandoned building of long hall­ways and classrooms. The dining room floor was covered with gas masks. They kept gas masks there and had regular drills because of the fear of gas or chemical weapons being used—old Cold War fears, I guess. Apparently the liquidators used the gas masks and the school building and left them all in the dining hall. Parts of the hallway and some of the rooms were filled with ruined books scattered on the floor. Why they were all thrown on the floor is a mystery, though Maxim tried unsuccessfully to explain it. Presumably scavengers took what they wanted but didn’t want books. In what was obviously a science room, there was an old chart of electromagnetic radiation on the wall—an interesting icon for the nuclear disaster!

We were running late for lunch—it was already 2:30—so we left and headed to the cafeteria. There were several tour buses there, so we had to wait about 15 minutes to get in. It was a decent and very filling lunch—but no mushrooms or berries! our last stop after lunch was to the cooling pond canal to feed the catfish! We threw pieces of bread from our lunch into the water and watched fish mill around to eat it. Smaller fish were going crazy but in the right spot in the middle of the railroad bridge you could see the large catfish congregate. They were very selective in what they ate. Apparently they got plenty of food. Maxim said these were just babies—only about 30 to 40 kilograms. The big ones in the main cooling pond run 300 to 400 kilograms! This is not due to the radiation, of course, but to the fact that there are no top predators, since fishing is not allowed.

I had hoped to see some birds or wildlife but did not really expect to. I saw a few crows, magpies, and hawks but no white-tailed eagles or black storks; also no wild pigs or any other wildlife. We were there in mid-day and not in the outlying areas of the exclusion zone, so I was not surprised but a bit disappointed. Still, it was a very interesting trip into “Chernobyl Radioactive Park”!

What is one to make of this place? As far as humans are concerned, it is a disas­ter for the people who had to leave their homes and establish themselves in new communities. And of course, it was a disaster for those who died from the radia­tion and a problem for the children who got thyroid cancer and will have to take thyroxin supplements for the rest of their lives. But the “Children of Chernobyl” organization is hyping the problem by trying to make everyone victims when most of the problems they report have nothing to do with the radiation.

As far as nature goes, the accident was a good thing. Since people are excluded, the plants, trees, birds, and animals are taking over. In spite of high radiation levels in some parts, nature is thriving. The best thing to do is to prevent people from ever coming back here to live and let nature rule. There are poachers and others who come to the forest, but the police try to keep them out. Hopefully the government will never decide to bring people back but will leave it as a wildlife preserve and a tourist destination. When you are in Pripyat away from the tour buses, it is so quiet and peaceful you can forget that civilization exists. That is the way it should be in this sacred place.

We left the exclusion zone and went through a full-body radiation scanner to detect any radiation picked up on our clothes or shoes. We were “normal” so we left the zone and headed back to Kiev. Quite a day!

Consequences for Nuclear Power

It is hard to generalize from the Chernobyl accident since the type of reactor is not operated anywhere else in the world outside the former Soviet Union, and all of the existing RBMK reactors in the Russian Federation have now been modified so that they would not suffer the same sequence of events that led to the accident, even given the same kind of operator errors. The design of western reactors was not affected, since none of them operated like the RBMK reactors.

Nevertheless, reactor safety became a worldwide issue. With Chernobyl com­ing on the heels of Three Mile Island, the world became more leery of nuclear power, with some countries becoming extremely anti-nuclear. Italy shut down its nuclear reactors in 1990 in response to Chernobyl, and Germany finished build­ing its last of 17 nuclear reactors in 1989 (35). The Chernobyl accident added to the pressure to end the building of new nuclear reactors in the United States. But over time, the worries about nuclear power were receding and nuclear reactors were being planned and built rapidly, particularly in Asia.

This is where I was going to conclude this chapter on accidents, but while I was writing the book, a natural catastrophe caused a nuclear accident in Japan and set the nuclear fear demons loose once again.