In villages they say that, if you don't fix you house, it will fall apart. That appears to be true
Chernobyl was by all measures a 20th century disaster – mixing nuclear meltdown with the cold war and the iron curtain. A biker called Elena from Ukraine rides his Kawasaki Ninja through northern Ukraine to Chernobyl, the so called “dead zone”. Why do this? In his own words: “Because one can take long rides there on empty roads. The people there all left and nature is blooming. There are beautiful woods and lakes. In places where roads have not been travelled by trucks or army vehicles, they are in the same condition they were 20 years ago – except for an occasional blade of grass or some tree that discovered a crack to spring through. Time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again … a few centuries from now.”
Books left on a classroom desk
First we must learn a little something about radiation. It is really very simple, and the device we use for measuring radiation levels is called a geiger counter. If you flick it on in Kiev, it will measure about 12-16 microroentgen per hour. In a typical city of Russia and America, it will read 10-12 microroentgen per hour. The centres of many European cities are 20 microR per hour, the radioactivity of the stone. 1,000 microroentgens equal one milliroentgen and 1,000 milliroentgens equal 1 roentgen. So one roentgen is 100,000 times the average radiation of a typical city. A dose of 500 roentgens within 5 hours is fatal to humans. Interestingly, it takes about 2 1/2 times that dosage to kill a chicken and over 100 times that to kill a cockroach. This sort of radiation level can not be found in Chernobyl now. In the first few days after explosion, some places around the reactor were emitting 3,000-30,000 roentgens per hour. The firemen who were sent to put out the reactor fire were fried on the spot by gamma radiation. The remains of the reactor were entombed within an enormous steel and concrete sarcophagus, so it is now relatively safe to travel to the area – as long as one do not step off of the roadway and does not put ones nose in the wrong place.
The nuclear reactor is visable on the horizon in this photo
On the Friday evening of April 25, 1986, the reactor crew at Chernobyl-4, prepared to run a test the next day to see how long the turbines would keep spinning and producing power if the electrical power supply went off line. This was a dangerous test, but it had been done before. As a part of the preparation, they disabled some critical control systems – including the automatic shutdown safety mechanisms.
Dead towns and villages only dead in the day, at night all awakes here. Things began to move and rustle.
At 1:23 AM, the operator moved to shut down the reactor in its low power mode and a domino effect of previous errors caused an sharp power surge, triggering a tremendous steam explosion which blew the 1000 ton cap on the nuclear containment vessel to smithereens.
An abondoned city taken over by the forest
Some of the 211 control rods melted and then a second explosion, throwing out fragments of the burning radioactive fuel core and allowed air to rush in – igniting several tons of graphite insulating blocks. Once graphite starts to burn, its almost impossible to extinguish. It took 9 days and 5000 tons of sand, boron, dolomite, clay and lead dropped from helicopters to put it out. The radiation was so intense that many of those brave pilots died.
Classic Soviet arcitechture
There’s a lot more of these beautiful but sad photographs over at English Russia and Elena’s website Kid Of Speed.
If you would like to help children and families affected by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, please visit Bridges To Belarus.
