At 1:23 on 26 April 1986, reactor four of the Chornobyl nuclear plant exploded during a safety test, releasing radioactive material across Europe. Two workers died immediately, 28 more of acute radiation syndrome within months, and the long-term toll remains disputed. Around 350,000 people were eventually resettled.
Pripyat
The plant town, three kilometres away, had 49,000 residents with an average age of 26. It was evacuated on 27 April with the instruction to take documents and food for three days. The fairground, due to open on 1 May, never officially opened; the yellow ferris wheel has become the emblem of the disaster. Trees now grow through the school, the hospital and the swimming pool, and buildings are collapsing, which is why access inside them is prohibited.
The sarcophagus
The concrete shelter built hastily in 1986 was deteriorating, and in 2016 a 36,000-tonne steel arch, the New Safe Confinement, was slid into place over it — the largest movable land structure ever built. It is designed to last a hundred years, during which the ruined reactor is to be dismantled.
The Duga radar
Nearby stands an over-the-horizon radar array 150 m high and 700 m long, part of the Soviet early warning system, whose transmissions were heard worldwide as a repeated tapping and nicknamed the Russian Woodpecker. It is the most physically imposing thing in the zone.
Wildlife
In the absence of people, the zone has become an involuntary nature reserve: wolves, lynx, elk, wild boar, bison and Przewalski horses introduced in 1998. Whether the animals are thriving or merely present without competition is a live scientific argument.
Access now
Tours from Kyiv operated legally from 2011 and carried tens of thousands of visitors a year. In February 2022 Russian forces occupied the zone for five weeks, driving vehicles through contaminated ground and mining parts of it. The zone has been closed to tourism since, and remains a military and demining concern. Do not attempt to enter; check official sources for any change.
Chornobyl town
The town of Chornobyl itself, 15 km from the plant, is older than the reactor by eight centuries and was never entirely emptied: several hundred workers rotate through it, and a small number of elderly returnees, the samosely, went back to their villages in the 1980s and were tolerated. Their number has dwindled to a handful.