Chernobyl

It is late at night when I get back to my Kyiv hotel room after a full day on the road visiting the ghost town of Pripyat and the exclusion zone around Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. While the recording of the radiation dosimeter would have been significantly higher had I spent the day in an airplane across the Atlantic, actually visiting the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident did leave me with a much more personal experience of nuclear risk. Seeing the abandoned beds in the nursery of Kopachi or walking through the beta particle detector before having lunch at the canteen of the Chernobyl plant reminded me of the very physicality and vulnerability of our bodies.  At the same time, the exclusion zone is a place where nature is bouncing back, the wildlife is thriving and the decontamination process has successfully restored a surprising degree of normality to many places. Overall I took more than 150 photos today but here are a few snapshots: