EXPLORING CHERNOBYL AS A TOURIST IN 2019 (is it safe?)

Just because it's close to the ground, rather concentrated, I don't know how I feel about it, it now seems likely that at some point in the last few days there will have been perhaps the worst accident in the short history of the global nuclear power industry, the Russians. They may have hoped to contain it without having to break the news, as they appear to have attempted to do so in earlier axons in the Urals. 19 years ago, the accident occurred in Chernobyl, a city of about 50,000 people about 50 miles north of kyiv. In Ukraine, 33 years ago, on April 26, reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, releasing a huge amount of deadly radiation into the air.

The Soviet death toll amounts to only 31 people immediately after the accident, while the final figure remains the same. Disputed research now shows that the long-term death toll ranges between 9,000 and 200,000 people. Today some parts of Chernobyl still contain high levels of radiation, however there are some areas that are considered

safe

to visit, so This morning a local picked us up. side in kyiv and we're spending the next two days in this renewable exclusion zone so we're about to head to Chernobyl and they just gave us these Geiger counters so this is what measures the radiation level and just one important thing What we must understand before starting.

The good thing is that there will always be some level of radiation. We are practically in the center of the city of kyiv and it measures 0.11, so you are always exposed to some level of background radiation in your life and I don't think radiation. What we are experiencing here in kyiv is unlike any other major city in the world, so something important to note is that today we are carrying them with us, so we have just arrived at the exclusion zone security checkpoint and No. there is filming here for obvious reasons but they are just checking our passports and then we had to sign some forms which basically said we would follow all the rules while in the area, a couple of which were interesting, starting with not eating berries and mushrooms. fires, a group of accountants say they think we will wear boots, long pants, long sleeves, more or less the idea is to cover all exposed skin because there is a small risk of radioactive particles sticking to it and, from what we have learned , it actually takes a little force to get them thrown into the air, so the weather is pretty good today, he said it worse, like maybe something sticking to your shoe just in case, from what we understand, this little guy USB device around our neck will tell us. how much radiation is building up in our body over the next two days.

Hey, this was a day packed with information in a lot of different places, so we put together this map to hopefully help you follow this black radiation warning. The symbol represents reactor 4 and you can use it as a reference while we explore the exclusion zone, so we have just entered the 30 kilometer exclusion zone, which means we are 30 kilometers from reactor 4 where the explosion occurred and the Geiger counter shows point 0 9, which is actually less than what was seen in the center of kyiv when we started this morning, as we were driving we passed these white signs on the road and they have information about the villages that were evacuated, so that how many people lived in them when they were evacuated the name of the towns and we just stopped at the first the eight Oh, so we are entering the town hall of one of the evacuated cities with a super eerie feeling that it hasn't been touched in almost 30 years, except maybe for looters who have come in here and stolen things and on the stage behind me you can still see the old Soviet propaganda, the floor here is covered with old camera film, I mean, it's obviously totally ruined But how great it would be to be able to see the photos that were in this crazy and residential area.

The five storage buildings, Lizabeth's father, will have toasted buttocks, risk of vomiting for the workers, so if you have seen the truly noble HBO series, it is possible. that you remember the trial towards the end of the series and we are currently looking at the courtroom where that trial actually took place. It's not actually where they filmed it, but this is like where it took place in real life in 1986 37 1987, okay. So this is probably the craziest thing we've learned all day and that's it, there are still over a hundred people living inside the exclusion zone, like people walking around here going about their daily lives, so in a moment the government began to move.

People came back to some of the areas that felt like we were

safe

and then the Soviet Union collapsed and they stopped the program, but there are about a hundred people who still have permission to live here and who live here full time, which sounds just. It's absolutely crazy, but we have our Geiger meter and it's reading 0.1, which is less than what it was reading in the city center of kyiv. I mean, I guess it's science, it makes sense that you could live here, but it seems absolutely crazy. This purple house behind us has a sign that says the owner of the house lives here, so people know not to mess with it so as not to enter, the workers here won't come to take anything, so I just entered the exclusion of 10 kilometers. area and looking at the Geiger counter is still the 1/1 point, which is more or less exactly what we were experiencing in the city center.

I thought for sure that at this point it would be going up, but nothing good, you know, point one, you know, Quentin starts. grow, so we are currently where the first village was within the ten kilometer exclusion zone. The houses here were all made of wood and there is practically no way to clean the radioactivity out of the wood, so what they decided to do was pretty much just tear down the entire town and bury it underground, so this is one of many burial sites for radioactive waste that are located within the exclusion zone and, going a little off the road, the Geiger counter went from point 2 to point 5, but he said so. like rockets if you keep going Wow just because it's close to the ground this I don't know how I feel about it that sound makes it so intense the beeping telling us it's not safe or it's just allowing you I know the levels are increasing.

I start if it's more than 0.3 meters it will always be more than 0.3 so we move it higher than 3 so we just pulled over to the side of the road and stopped at the first town inside the exclusion zone Six miles in and we're inside an abandoned preschool It's got to be one of the creepiest places I've ever been It's crazy It feels like they put all this stuff here on purpose, like to create what you'd see in a movie scene , but apparently the people who left were told that they would return in three days to a week, so they simply didn't take anything except what they needed, that's why they look like dolls, notebooks, school papers. pillows they just left it all behind because they thought they would come back, the crazy thing is that even though the school is right down the street from where the explosion happened, they weren't evacuated until six days later, so the explosion happened on a weekend. week and the children would have returned to school that week with all the radioactive matter in their hair.

We are inside a laboratory where they were studying the effects of radiation on fish in one of the cooling ponds located near one of the nuclear reactors. I'm currently as close as I can get to reactor four, which is the one that exploded and my reader says 0.86, so to put that in perspective, if you're on a plane, it could be between two and three, so I'm getting less radiation at the same time. side of reactor four that would be on a plane, which I don't know if that's good because we spend a lot of time on planes, but it's crazy, we're only 300 meters away, but what I thought.

It was also very interesting that if I said it's behind this concrete monument, the number decreases even more, it's like point three five, so it shows how important a barrier it is to prevent radiation from coming out, also the silver sarcophagus you see above, the reactor was put there in 2016, it weighs 36 thousand tons and it is the largest mobile structure, the largest mobile construction built and the heaviest in the world, they built it far from the reactor because obviously they couldn't build it on top because there There was too much radiation and then they just slid it over the top and it's used to confine all the radiation inside because the goal is to eventually dismantle and bury everything that's radioactive in there, which is it, so that was the old one, so that's the The first one, so we have to look at it like before 2016, it's at 14 and in the car, it makes the second one, it was 0.5 right from the bear to here, so this is the beginning of the red forest that got its nickname because all the trees They died and turned. this shade of red and it's because when the reactor exploded this is the way the wind was blowing so it pushed all the radioactive material towards this force and it's still a highly radioactive place today so we just entered to the city of Pripet where most of the people who worked at the power plant lived and it is also the closest city to reactor 4, so it is the one that suffered the most damage when it exploded.

Somehow our guide has timed it perfectly everywhere we have gone today to completely avoid the tour buses we have passed so many groups of people and somehow we have had all the places to ourselves we are alone in an abandoned village this is an old furniture shop in the village of Pripet that has just been completely abandoned the only thing left here is the wood because it is cheap and everything else has been stolen so after being here hundreds of times We feel like you might grow an extra finger. I hope to help, but again, it's free, decent, it's not so scary if you stick with the roots and if you don't do something crazy or stupid, follow the rules and you'll be fine, yes, we are currently walking around the big beautiful square of the city, which now looks like this, we have just arrived at this theater who is currently on the stage looking at the audience this giant lamp fell from the ceiling high above he was the leader of the Soviet Union at the time of the disaster and this is a sign celebrating 60 years of the Soviet Union a round piece of metal on the ground made our reader goes faster than anything we've seen so far apparently they don't know what it is, but whatever it was was super radioactive right there , it was easier to cover it now that we are in a supermarket, there are shopping carts everywhere. refrigerators Wow, we're practically driving through the middle of the red forest right now and even through the car, readers at 5.77, so this is where all the radioactive waste flew after the reactor exploded, so it's one of the most highly contaminated. areas that is crazy and so, we are out of this, so we are about to leave the ten kilometer exclusion zone, but to do so we have to go through a radiation check.

Can I show what Intel's will is and I lower the car, so if something sticks, okay, the car passes, there are no radioactive molecules attached to us tonight, we were saying it's the only private hotel within the area of exclusion. I had no idea about us, well we have about two hours, oh there's a car, so what about? we understand that these little USB devices that were weighing around our necks will tell us how much body, how much marijuana, how much radiation and apparently they live here for free water and electricity, it's all free if you work here and they pay you double for the scientists to fuel.