CHORNOBYL: World's worst nuclear disaster a haunting tourist attraction

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If you’re a traveller looking for a one-of-a-kind destination, it’s time to put Chornobyl on your bucket list.

Historic Eastern European cities such as Warsaw, Budapest and Prague may have a similar feel to Kyiv, but the opportunity to tour the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster — a popular tourist activity that attracted 80,000 visitors last year — sets Ukraine apart.

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“Why go to Ukraine instead of Poland, Hungary or Czechoslovakia? Because those countries don’t have Chornobyl,” said Gregory Truman, Ukraine International Airline’s general manager for North America.

Visits must be arranged at least five days in advance through an authorized company such as Chornobyl Tour and you’ll need to provide your passport so the government can conduct a background check. Further details are available at chernobyl-tour.com/english.

There’s nothing like wearing a geiger counter around your neck, tracking your exposure to gamma rays, to make you feel alive. And the first time your radiation detector starts beeping, your heart will surely race.

The first of six reactors at the Chornobyl power plant (two of which were never completed) went online in 1977. But while conducting a safety test on April 26, 1986, an explosion occurred in Reactor No. 4.

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The nuclear fallout was more than 100 times that of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Second World War and the radiation spread across numerous European countries.

The Soviets were initially slow to react, having no idea how to deal with the meltdown or how it would impact nearby residents, but eventually began an evacuation that saw nearly 120,000 people bused from the area in hours.

Today, organized bus tours leave from Kyiv and make the two-hour drive to the Chornobyl exclusion zone — a 30-km area surrounding the power plant that is guarded by soldiers.

Inside the exclusion zone, which is secured by a gated checkpoint, you can visit the crumbling farmer’s village of Zalissya, where some residents went into hiding during the evacuation and later returned to their homes.

There’s also the massive Radar Duga-1, a secret military installation designed to detect incoming missiles from the U.S. that never actually worked.

Expect your geiger counter to start beeping rapidly at the abandoned village of Kopachi, where most buildings were simply bulldozed and buried.

The kindergarten building still stands and it’s truly haunting to walk from room to room seeing the children’s bed frames and scattered toys.

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But the most eerie site is the town of Prypiat.

Built in 1970 for power plant workers and their families and having as many as 50,000 residents at the time of the disaster, this once utopian town has been frozen in time.

Sadly, time hasn’t been kind to the soccer stadium, indoor swimming pool, supermarket, hotel and highrise apartment building — all of which are crumbling.

But most chilling is the stillness of the massive ferris wheel rising up into the blue sky, as well as the rusty bumper cars and other rides in the amusement park where kids played and laughed even as the reactor burned and workers were dying.

Interestingly, wildlife around the power plant has flourished in the wake of the disaster. You may not spot any Mongolian horses or Belarusian bears that now populate the area, but you will see some wild dogs that are actually quite friendly.

The nearby town of Chornobyl is also still populated by a few hundred residents, many of them workers who have been decommisisoning the remaining reactors in recent years.

Standing outside Reactor No. 4, now covered by a massive steel and concrete sarcophagus, you will no doubt be taken aback as you think about the radiation contained within and those who were killed in the disaster — lives memorialized by a monument erected steps away.

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During your tour, you will be treated to a not-so-tasty lunch in the workers’ cafeteria, which you can only enter after stepping into a bizarre old machine that measures radiation levels.

Visitors are served by lunch ladies aptly described by Chornobyl Tour guide Helen Ludekha as “extremely grumpy” — possibly because they work every day in a former disaster zone.

Leaving the exclusion zone at the end of a long day, your radiation levels are checked once more — and when you’ve been cleared, you can finally breathe easy again.

cdoucette@postmedia.com

On Twitter: @SunDoucette