14 June
Chernobyl. I join colleagues from the British Council to visit the Chernobyl nuclear plant. It lies 140 km north of Kyiv, near the border with Belarus, which took much of the worst contamination. Our programme includes the town of Chernobyl, 18 km from the power station; Reactor No.4, which exploded on 26 April 1986; and a tour of Pripyat, the city of 50,000 people founded in 1970 2 km from the plant to house workers and evacuated forever on 27 April 1986. We also enjoy lunch in the canteen at Chernobyl - who could resist that - and feed the giant cat-fish in the irradiated cooling ponds. Our guide, from outfit http://pripyat.com/en, carries a geiger counter at all times, whose chattering sometimes surges from a normal background level of around 12 microroentgens per hour to 400, 1500 or on one innocuous-looking patch of asphalt in a playground, 8,000. Some images, such as the sarcophagus at Reactor No.4, are iconic.
But there are surprises, not least the fact that thousands of people still work at the plant, while others live in Chernobyl town, administering the exclusion zone and running the clean-up. Pripyat is a Soviet city abandoned in a hurry, returning to nature. Even after 23 years of souvenir hunting and vandalism, there's much to see. Maybe the fact that the souvenirs could be dusted with Caesium 137 is a deterrent.
Visiting Chernobyl is controversial. Some people believe the danger of irradiation is unacceptable (children under 18 are not allowed). Others argue "disaster tourism" is immoral. My take: if you're comfortable with the possible risks, it's an education in the dangers of unaccountable decision-makers; and the importance of swift action when things go wrong. Perhaps my strongest image is of the people of Pripyat swarming onto a railway bridge on the night of 26 April 1986 to watch the fire, unaware that by doing so they were exposing themselves to potentially fatal radiation. The bridge, and the view, are still there.
