Meltdown

Greg Annandale visits the frozen-in-time Chernobyl plant.

By Peak Design

Exclusion zone

In April 1986, an explosion in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant released huge quantities of radioactive contamination into the atmosphere, which ultimately spread over much of the then Western USSR and Europe. It's considered to be the worst nuclear plant accident in history. After the explosion, residents were evacuated and the surrounding area has remained largely abandoned due to lasting radiation.

Our friend, Greg Annandale (@greg_a), recently visited this area to get a glimpse of a city frozen in time. Below he shares some of what he saw...

A trip into the Chernobyl exclusion zones is a fascinating experience; clearly a saddening and sobering one, yet at times beautiful - both in glimpsing what the area's architecture once was but also in what transformations nature has now brought.

The entire zone itself stretches for over 1,000 square miles, with 6 and 18 mile exclusion zones drawn up around the worst of the contamination. A two-day trip to the zones allowed us to visit many of the city of Pripyat's buildings (the hospital, swimming pool, gym, postal building and cultural center) along with seeing the reactor building itself (recently covered in a new 'sarcophagus' protecting it, and us, for the next few centuries) and other parts of the sprawling power plant.

The images below are of the Duga radar array, an early-warning missile detection system that was built within what's now the exclusion zone in an attempt to hide its monstrous proportions. There really is no getting over just quite how big this thing is (around 1000ft high and many times that in length), and its only one of a number of transmitter and receiver stations.

control center

Behind the array is a lengthy reinforced corridor - protection for the workers from the array's emissions and housing the various control rooms and large server rooms required to process the radar's data. Anything of value is of course long gone, but the empty server racks and various circuit boards and literature remain scattered across the floor.

pripyat

The town of Pripyat, housing close to 50,000 inhabitants, was evacuated the day after the incident at the reactor. 1200 buses took the residents out within 4 hours. Residents were told they would be able to return within a few days, but of course they never did. Save for looters, the city has remained almost as it was; stuck in time on Sunday morning, April 27th 1986.

cooling towers

The unfinished cooling towers are barely a mile from reactor 4, where the explosions occurred. They are a hotbed of contaminants, but venturing inside provides the most amazing of perspectives. Not quite of the same scale as the Duga array, but it's still hard to appreciate the size of these things until you get up close. Scaffolding just about clings on to the upper levels of this particular rim.