35 years on, Chernobyl warns and inspires
The vast and empty Chernobyl Exclusion Zone around the website of the world's worst nuclear accident is a baleful monument to human mistakes. Yet 35 years after a power plant reactor exploded, Ukrainians also look to it for inspiration, solace and income.Reactor No. 4 at the power plant 110 kilometers (65 miles) north of the administrative centre Kyiv exploded and caught fire deep in the night on April 26, 1986, shattering the building and spewing radioactive material high in to the sky.
Soviet authorities made the catastrophe a whole lot worse by failing to tell the general public what had happened - although the near by plant workers' town of Pripyat was evacuated the next day, the two 2 million residents of Kyiv weren't informed regardless of the fallout danger. The world learned of the disaster only after heightened radiation was detected in Sweden.
Eventually, more than 100,000 people were evacuated from the vicinity and a 2,600-square-kilometer (1,000-square-mile) exclusion zone was established where in fact the only activity was personnel disposing of waste and maintaining a hastily built sarcophagus within the reactor. Radiation continued to leak from the reactor building until 2019, when the whole building was included in a massive arch-shaped shelter. As robots inside the shelter began dismantling the reactor, officials felt new optimism about the zone.
"This is a location of tragedy and memory, but it is also a location where you can observe how an individual can overcome the results of a global catastrophe," said Bohdan Borukhovskyi, Ukraine's deputy environment minister."We wish a new narrative to seem - it was not really a zone of exclusion, but a zone of development and revival," he said.For him, that narrative includes encouraging tourism.
