Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  It all filled me with a churning panic. I just don’t like being a clueless foreigner in a strange city where I’ve got no friends. I was also having trouble finding a portable radiation detector for my trip to the Exclusion Zone around Chernobyl. The detector would come in handy for measuring my radioactive exposure, with great precision, in units I wouldn’t understand. But Amazon didn’t deliver overnight to Kiev, and so I was out of ideas. It was time to be resourceful—I had to get someone else to figure it out.

  If journalism can teach us anything, it’s that local people are a powerful tool to save us from our own fecklessness and incompetence. We call them fixers. In my case, I hired a capable young journalism school graduate called Olena. Skeptical at first, she soon realized that I was less interested in a simple rehash of the local disaster story than in exploring new touristic horizons, and she warmed to the concept. Olena set to work finding the radiation detector, calling one Chernobyl-related bureaucracy after another. To our surprise, nobody had any ideas. Even the government’s Chernobyl ministry, Chernobylinterinform, was clueless. Measuring radiation didn’t seem to be much of a priority among the citizens of Kiev. Maybe they just didn’t want to think about what lay a short way upriver.

  It’s possible there is wisdom in such willful ignorance. The subject of radiation, after all, is so mysterious, and its units and measurement so confusing, that carrying around a little beeping gadget may not, in the end, leave you any better informed about your safety.

  But every visitor to Chernobyl should have a working understanding of radiation and how it’s measured. So let’s review the basics. You can skip this section if you want, but you’ll miss the part where I tell you the one weird old tip for repelling gamma rays.

  Radiation, as far as tourists need be concerned, comes in three flavors: alpha, beta, and gamma. One source of radiation is unstable atoms—those same atoms that are so useful in building a nuclear core. In contrast to lighter, trustier elements like iron or helium, uncomfortably obese elements like uranium and plutonium are always looking for excuses to shed bits of themselves. That is to say, they are radioactive. These unstable elements will occasionally fart out things we call alpha or beta particles or gamma rays—the latter being the nasty stuff. This process—called decay—leaves the atom a bit smaller and sometimes with a different name, as it is alchemically transformed from one radioactive element into another.

  Once in a while, an atom will suffer a complete breakdown and split in half. That’s fission. After the split, particles and gamma rays spew off in all directions, and two atoms of a lighter element are left behind.

  But we’ll get to that. The point is, between decay and fission and other sources, there’s radiation zipping around and through us all the time. There’s the natural decay of Earth’s atoms, and there are cosmic rays shooting down at us from outer space (you get a higher dose when you’re up in an airplane), and then there’s the X-ray your dentist gave you, and so on. You’re getting irradiated all the time. But don’t freak out yet. Although radiation can burn your skin, give you cancer, and disrupt the functioning of your very cells, it takes a lot of it.

  And that’s the problem. How much counts as a lot? It’s hard even to predict how badly you’ll get sunburned on a day trip to the beach, and that’s with plain old solar radiation. In the nuclear case, your only hope of a clue is to have a radiation detector on hand.

  Even with a detector, you’re likely to remain confused by the bewildering array of terms and units with which radiation and radioactive dosage are measured. There are rads and rems, sieverts and grays, roentgens, curies and becquerels, around which buzz a swarm of attending coulombs, ergs, and joules. You might want to know the disintegration rate of a radioactive material, or its potential to ionize the air around it, or the amount of energy it can impart to solid matter, or the amount of energy it actually does impart to the living tissue of hapless organisms—such as Chernobyl tourists—and on and on.

  And then it all depends on how quickly you get your dose. In this, radiation is analogous to certain other poisons, such as alcohol. A single shot of bourbon every weekend for a year is hardly dangerous. But fifty shots on a single night will kill you.

  Finally, it matters which part of your body gets irradiated. Limb? Count yourself lucky. Guts? Not so much.

  So it’s no wonder that radiation is so mysterious and frightening, and that it features in the backstories of so many comic book monsters. It’s invisible, deadly, cosmic, extremely confusing, and rides shotgun with the nuclear apocalypse. The stuff is just spooky, and if—like me—you’re never going to have an intuitive understanding of its dosage and true risks, you might as well ease off on worrying about it so much. The purpose of the detector, then, is not to better understand the danger in your environment, but to gather up your anxiety and bundle it into a single number on a small digital readout, so you can carry your fear more efficiently.

  Oh—and the tip for repelling gamma rays is that you can’t.

  Olena had a plan. “Let’s go to Karavayevi Dachi,” she said. “Electronics black market.”

  What Manhattan’s Chinatown is to food, Kiev’s Karavayevi Dachi is to electronics. It was early afternoon when we arrived. Metal stalls lined its alleys, roller-fronts thrown up to reveal jumbles of electronic components and devices. Men with rough, sun-cured faces sat at wooden folding tables strewn with vacuum tubes, transformers, electrical plugs, computer chips, adapters. The husks of car stereos hung in bunches, banana-like. It seemed doubtful that we would find a working radiation detector here among the tangled heaps of wires and transistors, and as we went from stall to stall, the conversations followed a pattern that always ended in “nyet.”

  One man claimed to have a detector at home that he would sell us for only 150 hryvnia—about thirty bucks. The catch was that it could only detect beta radiation. Forget it, dude. Any simpleton knows that beta particles—which can be blocked by regular clothes—are nowhere near as scary or stylish as gamma rays. We walked off to another part of the market, the annoyed vendor calling after us in protest, “But beta is the best!”

  Another man had been eavesdropping and now approached us. He knew of a better place to find radiation detectors, he said, just a five-minute walk up the street. He would be happy to take us there. We left Karavayevi Dachi behind and made our way up a tree-lined street of brick apartment blocks.

  Our guide’s name was Volod. A middle-aged man with receding hair brushed straight back, he wore a beige coat over a striped beige shirt and beige jeans, and didn’t seem to have much more of an idea than I did of where we were going. Our five-minute walk grew to fifteen and then twenty minutes, and I became progressively less convinced that we were detector-bound.

  Striking up a conversation, we soon learned that Volod had been a communications officer in the Soviet army during the 1980s and had worked in the Exclusion Zone for two weeks, starting a month after the accident.

  I asked him if he had received a liquidator’s certificate. The “liquidators,” in the creepy argot of the accident, were the thousands of workers, mostly soldiers, who had spent months razing villages to the ground and covering them with fresh earth, washing off roads, even chopping down and burying entire contaminated forests. The destroyed reactor had coated the landscape with radioactive dust and peppered it with actual chunks of nuclear fuel hurled clear by the explosion. It had been critical not to leave all that waste out in the open, where it could be tracked out of the zone or blown into the air by the wind. The liquidators’ job was to clean it all up.

  Many liquidators received high doses of radiation, and in consideration for their work, they were given special ID certificates that confirmed their status as veterans of the disaster cleanup. They were entitled to certain benefits, including special healthcare and preferential treatment in the housing system, but these benefits varied depending on each liquidator’s dosage, on how soon after the accident he’d gotten there, and on how long he’d worked in t
he zone. A new mess was created—this time governmental. The system was riddled with loopholes, inconsistent in awarding benefits, and extravagant in its opportunities for corruption.

  Volod told us he had not received a certificate. He hadn’t been in the zone long enough, or early enough, he said. He didn’t want to talk about it.

  We were a good half hour from Karavayevi Dachi when he cried out. He had spotted the fabled detector store at last, among a small row of shops on the ground floor of an office building. We entered at a triumphant stride.

  With its zealous air-conditioning and spotless tile floors, the store was a step up from the grungy maze of Karavayevi Dachi. Its offerings, though, were even more varied. Scanning the room, I saw shelves of videophones and security cameras next to displays of construction paper, coloring books, and crayons. Behind us, an entire section was given over to a plastic oasis of elaborate garden fountains cast in the shape of tree stumps. Between this and the Chernobyl Museum, I was beginning to discern a Ukrainian national genius for eclecticism.

  And they sold radiation detectors. PADEKC, said the brand name on the box. NHDNKATOP PADNOAKTNBHOCTN. The device itself was a small, white plastic box with a digital readout and three round buttons. It looked like an early-model iPod, if iPods had been built by PADEKC. It was simple and stylish, perfect for hip, young professionals on the go in a nuclear disaster zone. Leonid—the salesman—assured me that it could measure not only gamma radiation but alpha and beta as well. (Leonid was a liar.)

  He turned it on. “Russian made,” he said. We crowded around. The unit beeped uncertainly a few times, then popped up a reading of 16. Sounded good to me. I coughed up far too many hryvnia and tossed the PADEKC in my backpack, and we went outside.

  In front of the store, Volod asked for some money. I had been dreading his price.

  “You should pay me vodka money,” he said without irony. “A good bottle will cost about twelve hryvnia.” He considered a dollar’s worth of vodka decent pay for an hour’s work. I handed him twenty hryvnia. As he started for the street, I asked him if he would tell us more about his time in Chernobyl.

  He stopped and turned to us, suddenly taller.

  “As a former Soviet officer, I cannot,” he said. And then he wandered off to buy his vodka.

  The problem with Reactor No. 4 was not so much that its safety systems failed—although you could say they did—but that some of those systems had been disabled. Now, you could also argue that when you’re running a thousand-megawatt nuclear reactor, you should never, ever disable any of its safeguards, but then…well, there’s no but. You’d be right.

  Those systems were disabled by an overzealous bunch of engineers who were eager to run some tests on the power plant and thought that they could do so without a safety net. On the evening of April 25, 1986, they began an experiment to see if the reactor’s own electrical needs could be supplied by a freewheeling turbine in the event of a power outage. This is a little bit like stalling your car on the highway and trying to use its coasting momentum to run the AC. But in this case, it involved a three-stories-tall pile of nuclear fuel.

  Over the course of several hours, the reactor failed to run hot enough for the experiment to proceed, so more and more control rods were pulled out of the core to juice the chain reaction up to a suitable level. Meanwhile, the flow of water through the core had dropped below normal levels, allowing more and more heat and steam to build up inside the reactor, a condition that made it dangerously volatile. The built-in systems to prevent all this from taking place were among the safeguards that had been shut off so the test could proceed.

  In the wee hours of April 26, the operators noticed a spike in the heat and power coming from the reactor and realized that, if the control rods weren’t reinserted immediately, the reactor would run out of control. It is assumed that they pushed the panic button to drop the control rods back into the core and stop the chain reaction—but panic was not enough. Not only were the rods too slow in sinking down into the reactor, but as they did so, they also displaced even more water, actually increasing the rate of reaction for a moment. The horrified engineers were powerless to stop it.

  Within seconds, the power level in the core outstripped its normal operational level by a hundredfold. The water in the core exploded into superheated steam, blowing the two-thousand-ton reactor shield off the core. Moments later another explosion—possibly of steam, possibly of hydrogen, possibly an event called a nuclear excursion—punched a gaping hole in the top of the building. Bits of nuclear fuel rained down on the reactor complex and nearby landscape, setting the building and its surroundings on fire.

  Inside the core, unknown to the panicking staff, the superheated blocks of graphite that formed the matrix of the reactor had also burst into flame, and the remaining nuclear fuel, completely uncontrolled, was melting into a radioactive lava that would burrow its way into the basement. All the while, radioactive smoke, dust, and steam spewed into the sky, a giant nuclear geyser that continued to erupt for days on end.

  Before long, radiation sensors in Sweden were picking up the downwind contamination, and American spy satellites were focusing on the belching ruin of the reactor building, and the whole world was wondering exactly what the hell had happened in Chernobyl. In some ways, we still don’t know.

  My pants made nylon swooshing sounds as I descended the musty stairwell of my apartment building. I had bought a tracksuit for my weekend trip to Chernobyl, which made me look like a Ukrainian jackass circa 1990, but it was disposable in case of contamination.

  By chance, I was staying right across the street from the Chernobylinterinform, from which my trip to the zone would depart. This was in the time before Chernobyl tourism became officially sanctioned. In 2011, the policy was changed so that any yahoo could sign up for a tour through a travel agent—whereas in my day, that yahoo had to…sign up for a tour through a travel agent. I really don’t know the difference, except that now the tours are officially offered to the public as tourism. Like most destinations after the word gets out, the place is probably ruined by now.

  It was a beautiful day for a road trip, cloudless and faintly breezy. Nikolai, a lanky young driver for the Chernobyl authority, found a radio station playing insistent techno that suited his cheerful urgency with the accelerator, and we made our way out through the busy streets of northern Kiev. (Radiation level at the gas station: 20 microroentgens.) We followed the Dnieper River north, until it wandered out of sight to the east. The road coasted through undulating farmland, bordered in stretches by lines of shady trees screening out the rising heat of the day. In our little blue station wagon, we plunged through villages, tearing past a boy idling on his bicycle, an old lady waddling along the road, a horse-drawn cart loaded with hay.

  Soon there were no more villages, only countryside and thickening pine forests dotted with fire-warning signs. Compared with forest fires in the United States, which are disastrous mostly for their potential to destroy people’s houses, a forest fire in the Chernobyl area carries added detriments. Trees and vegetation have incorporated the radionuclides into their structure, mistaking them for naturally occurring nutrients in the soil (one reason to shy away from produce grown near the zone). A forest fire here has the potential to release those captured radioactive particles back into the air and become a kind of nuclear event all its own. It’s just one way in which the accident at Chernobyl has never really ended.

  Less than two hours out from Kiev, we arrived at a checkpoint. A candy-striped bar blocked the road between two guardhouses. There were signs with a lot of exclamation points and radioactivity symbols. Nikolai and I stepped out of the car and I gave my passport to the approaching guard. He wore a blue-gray camouflage uniform, a cap bearing the Ukrainian trident, and a little film badge dosimeter on his chest, to measure his cumulative exposure while in the area. I should have asked him where I could get one of those.

  After a cursory search, we hopped back into the car. The barricade rose,
Nikolai gunned the engine, and we left the checkpoint, traveling onward through the forest, down the middle of a sun-dappled road that no longer had a center line.

  We had entered the Exclusion Zone.

  At the Chernobylinterinform administrative building, in the town of Chernobyl—nearly ten miles distant from the reactor itself—we met Dennis, my escort. Standing at the top of the steps to the low, yellow building, Dennis matched the quasi-military vibe of the zone. He was in his mid-twenties, with an early baldness made irrelevant by a crew cut, and wore combat boots and a camouflage jacket and pants. The look was completed—and the martial spell broken—by a black sleeveless T-shirt printed with the image of a football helmet, around which swirled a cloud of English words. A pair of wraparound sunglasses hid his eyes.

  “First is the briefing,” he said coolly. “This is upstairs.” And with that he walked back into the building.

  The briefing room was a long, airy space, its walls hung with photographs and maps. A wooden table surrounded by a dozen chairs dominated the center of the room. The floor was covered with an undulating adhesive liner printed to look like wood paneling. Must make for easy cleanup, I thought, in case anyone tracks in a little cesium.

  Dennis and I were alone. The summer season hadn’t picked up yet. He retrieved a gigantic wooden pointer from the corner, and we approached a large topographic map on the front wall. He began diagramming our itinerary using his tree limb of a pointer, though the map was mere inches in front of us.

  “We are here. Chernobyl,” he said, and tapped on the map. “We will drive to Kolachi. Buried village.” He tapped again. “Then to Red Forest. This is most radioactive point today.” He looked at me for emphasis. He was still wearing his sunglasses.