Where the power plant is located directly, the cities of Chernobyl and Pripyat, the north of the Polessky district of the Kiev region (including the village of Polesskoye and the village of Vilcha), as well as part of the Zhytomyr region up to the border with Belarus. Since June 2010, the Narodichi district in the Zhytomyr region has been removed from the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

Story

The exclusion zone was established shortly after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Three controlled territories were defined on the territory of the Zone:

• Special zone (directly at the Chernobyl industrial site),
• 10 km zone.
• 30 km zone.

The population from the contaminated territories was evacuated. For the workers who remained to serve the power plant and the Exclusion Zone, strict dosimetric control of transport was organized, and decontamination points were deployed. On the borders of the zones, the transfer of working people from one vehicle to another was organized to reduce the transfer of radioactive substances.

However, large areas of contaminated territories remained outside the 30-kilometer zone, and starting from the 1990s, the settlements of the Polessky district were gradually resettled, in which the pre-accident level of contamination with radionuclides exceeded the norms established by law. So, by 1996, the village was finally resettled. Polisske, town. Vilcha, p. Dibrova, p. New World and many others. Since 1997, this territory became part of the Chernobyl zone, was transferred under the control of the Ministry of Emergency Situations and included in the security perimeter.

By 2011, more than a third of the lands previously included in the exclusion zone were put into economic circulation in Belarus. The total area of ​​such territories amounted to 16.35 thousand km² out of 46.45 thousand km² withdrawn from economic circulation in 1986.

Description

The exclusion zone today is a surface open radioactive source. Within the limits of radioactively contaminated territories, a number of works are being carried out to prevent the spread of radioactive contamination beyond the exclusion zone and the entry of radionuclides into the main water bodies of Ukraine (the Kiev reservoir, the Dnieper River, etc.).

The Ukrainian part of the exclusion zone and the zone of unconditional (mandatory) resettlement has an area of ​​about 2598 km2. The administrative center of the exclusion zone is the city of Chernobyl. Chernobyl is home to the Exclusion Zone Administration (AZO), which is a department of the Ministry of Emergency Situations. In the exclusion zone itself, there are personnel of AZO enterprises, personnel of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and a small number of civilians (self-settlers). The civilian population lives in 11 abandoned settlements. The total number of civilians does not exceed 300 people. The number of personnel working in the exclusion zone and at the Chernobyl NPP is approximately 5,000 people, of which about 3,000 live in Slavutych.

On the territory of the zone there are 11 objects of the natural reserve fund of Ukraine. The modern exclusion zone is gradually turning into a reserve for the life of rare animals. The presence of such rare species as bear, otter, badger, muskrat, lynx, deer, Przewalski's horse has been established. Elk, roe deer, wolves, foxes, hares, wild boars and bats are also found in huge numbers. According to Sergei Gashchak from the Chernobyl Center for Nuclear Safety Problems, the organisms of wild animals themselves cope with an increased background, chemical contamination of the territory, and other negative factors. Thus, the removal of the anthropogenic impact had a positive effect, hundreds of times greater than the negative impact of a man-made disaster.

The modern territory of the exclusion zone is a place of illegal tourism - stalking. The problem of illegal entry into the exclusion zone caused tougher administrative penalties, and the removal of items from the zone entails criminal liability (Article 267-1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine).

Radionuclides

In December 2010, the head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Viktor Baloga, organized an excursion to the exclusion zone for the administrator of the UN Development Program, Helen Clark.

On April 20, 2011, as part of the events dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, together with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano, visited the industrial site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

On April 26, 2011, on the day of the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych and President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev laid flowers at the foot of the memorial sign to the liquidators of the consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and honored the liquidators with a minute of silence. On the same day, His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia served a funeral liturgy near the monument, and later performed a short Paschal prayer service in St. Ilyinsky Chernobyl Church.

On September 6, 2011, within the framework of an official visit to Ukraine, the Chernobyl NPP was visited by a Japanese parliamentary delegation headed by the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the Parliament of Japan, Mr. Takahiro Yokomichi.

Current state

According to Yuri Andreev, one of the operators of the second block shield of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant during its activity and the liquidator of the consequences of the accident, in an interview with the BBC, the zone continues to settle in self-settlers, some of which are landless farmers who arrived there, took abandoned houses, They set up their own farm there, live and work. According to the words of the liquidator, "the re-evacuation is already underway on its own." In addition, “marauders who still rob abandoned houses, take out metal and slate from there, and drug addicts who grow drugs in this zone” are still walking in the zone.

see also

• Polessky State Radiation-Ecological Reserve - continuation of the Zone on the territory of Belarus

Notes

1. Law of the USSR dated 05/12/1991 N2146-1 "On the social protection of citizens affected by the Chernobyl disaster" . economics.kiev.ua (May 12, 1991). Archived from the original on June 4, 2012. Retrieved March 30, 2012.
2. First Report to the IAEA. 1986 Chapter 5.8. Decontamination of the 30-kilometer zone.
3. http://zakon.rada.gov.ua/cgi-bin/laws/main.cgi?nreg=791%E0-12 The Law of Ukraine “On the Legal Regime of the Territory…”
4. In Belarus, an inventory of "Chernobyl" lands will be carried out. Rosbalt (03/08/2011). Archived from the original on February 23, 2012. Retrieved September 20, 2011.
5. Kotlyar, Pavel. Nature took Chernobyl into its hands (Russian), infox.ru(April 26, 2010). Retrieved December 9, 2010.
6. Stalkers and visiting Chernobyl and the exclusion zone of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant
7. Journalistic investigation of the problem of Chernobyl stalking in the exclusion zone
8. Criminal Code of Ukraine. (ukr.)
9. Lesya Holovata Chornobyl stalkers (Ukrainian). zaxid.net (26-04-10). Archived from the original on February 23, 2012. Retrieved November 21, 2011. Translation of the article into Russian. inoforum.ru
10. Tatiana Ivzhenko Ukraine invites stalkers. Nezavisimaya Gazeta (December 17, 2010).

We are publishing material prepared for the site by Belarusian journalist Vasily SEMASHKO following his numerous trips to the Belarusian segment of the Chernobyl zone in recent years.

Photos in the text were taken by Vasily Semashko (color) and Sergey Plytkevich (black and white). You can view the photos in full size by clicking on them with the left mouse button.

Polissky Reserve

Belarusian eastern Polissya is part of the largest swamp in Europe, located along the banks of the Pripyat River.

Flat terrain, impenetrable swamps, partially destroyed by land reclamation of the 1960s-1970s, sandy islands with pine forests, full-flowing Pripyat with countless labyrinths of channels along both banks, where in places there are natural beaches with amazing white quartz sand.

Overflow of the Pripyat River

The Chernobyl disaster divided the local life into "before" and "after". "Before" - a calm, measured life, when from Belarusian villages they went to Pripyat to shops, and some of the Belarusians even worked at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. "After" - what can be seen now.

Plans for the evacuation of the population from the 30-km zone in the event of an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant were developed long before the accident, which generally confirmed the correctness of these calculations. The population from this zone was evacuated in the first days of the disaster.

Partially, the zone was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and in 1988 it was declared a reserve. Judging by the presence of plastic insulators on the wooden posts, an alarm was provided. The remains of this fence, already fallen down, can still be seen in some places both in Belarus and Ukraine.

Later it became clear that radioactive fallout was extremely uneven. There are practically clean places in the 30-km zone, and in some places people had to be resettled as far as 150 kilometers away. Because of this, in Belarus, the boundaries of the resettlement zone were adjusted until 1992.

Also, during the resettlement in Belarus, they tried not to touch the regional centers and some important roads. As a result, the boundaries of the resettlement zone turned out to be very winding. So, the border of the restricted zone lay next to the busy highway Khoiniki-Bragin and further along the outskirts of Bragin.

Polessky State Radiation-Ecological Reserve was organized in 1988 in the Belarusian part of the exclusion zone on the territory of the three regions of the Gomel region most affected by the disaster - Braginsky, Khoiniki and Narovlyansky.

On the territory of the reserve there are 96 abandoned settlements, where more than 22 thousand inhabitants lived before the accident. The administration of PGRER is located in the city of Khoiniki.

Initially, the area of ​​PGRER was 1313 km 2 . After joining to it in 1993 a part of the adjacent resettled territory, the area of ​​the reserve is 2154 km 2, which turned it into the largest in Belarus.

About 30% of cesium-137, 73% of strontium-90, 97% of plutonium-238, 239, 240 isotopes are concentrated on the territory of the PGRER. km 2 - for strontium-90, 5 Ci / km 2 - for isotopes of plutonium and americium-241.

Due to the presence in ecosystems of significant amounts of long-lived isotopes of plutonium and americium, the main territory of the reserve cannot be returned to economic use even in the long term.

In the Polessky State Radiation-Ecological Reserve, 1251 plant species are registered, which is more than two thirds of the country's flora, 18 of them are listed in the International Red Book and the Red Book of the Republic of Belarus. The fauna includes 54 species of mammals, 25 species of fish, 280 species of birds. More than 40 species of animals are classified as rare and endangered.

The staff of the reserve is about 700 people, 10 of them have a scientific degree. The annual cost of the reserve is about 4 million US dollars.

Belarusian zone

In the first years after the accident, the main task of the guards was to prevent the looting of the abandoned property. Then people did not realize the full significance of the disaster and expected to return to their homes by autumn.

Initially, policemen sent here on a two-week business trip were on duty at the checkpoint of the restricted zone, for whom this business trip turned into a two-week binge. Later, they were replaced by employees of the reserve from local residents, and there was a little more order. The local police are also involved in the protection of the reserve - their cars have a radiation hazard sign.

It was the Chernobyl disaster that became the impetus for the founding of the Ministry of Emergency Situations in Belarus. In 1990-1991, the State Committee of the BSSR on Problems of the Consequences of the Catastrophe at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (Goskomchernobyl of the BSSR) was created, which in 1995 was reorganized into the Ministry for Emergency Situations and Protection of the Population from the Consequences of the Catastrophe at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

In 1998, the words "and the protection of the population from the consequences of the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant" in the name of the "Ministry of Emergency Situations" were abolished, the State Committee for Chernobyl became part of the Ministry of Emergency Situations.

In 2001, for some reason, the State Chernobyl Committee was separated from the Ministry of Emergency Situations into a separate structure under the Council of Ministers of Belarus, in order to return it to the Ministry of Emergency Situations again in 2006.

Now the main task of the reserve is to ensure a state of rest in the zone so that the precipitated radionuclides are not transferred to a clean territory.

That is why the reserve operates in closed mode - any types of industrial activity are prohibited in the zone, and in general, the presence of strangers there is minimized.

The Belarusian Chernobyl zone is divided into the following parts. Closer to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is the exclusion zone with the highest level of radiation pollution. All human activity is prohibited in the exclusion zone.

Further from the epicenter is the resettlement zone. Limited human activity is allowed here. Basically, this is the planting of forests to prevent wind erosion of the soil and the blocking of old irrigation canals in order to waterlog the area to reduce the risk of fires.

For the same purpose, geodetic signals, which have become unnecessary with the development of satellite navigation, are brought to the zone from different regions of Belarus, which are used here as observation towers to detect fires.

Also, these towers can be used as a telephone call center - there is no cellular connection near the ground, and at a height of more than 20 meters - it works fine in any part of the zone. Moreover, Ukrainian mobile operators are also caught in many places.

Sometimes poachers visit the area. Every year there are fewer of them - fines have increased significantly, the practice of confiscation of vehicles has begun to be applied, and security has begun to work better.

Unlike Ukraine, where the so-called "Chernobyl tourism" is developed - organized excursions to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and a visit to Pripyat - there is no such thing in Belarus, and is not planned yet.

Those who need it for work, including journalists (far from all), are allowed into the zone with special permission, as well as for the purpose of burying the deceased in their native places. However, once a year, anyone can visit the zone, as described below.

Babchin

If in the Ukrainian part of the Chernobyl zone there are relatively large cities of Chernobyl and Pripyat, a railway, then in Belarus there are only villages that did not even have churches.

If in Ukraine the central entrance to the Chernobyl zone is the Dityatki checkpoint, in Belarus it is the Babchin checkpoint, 20 kilometers from Khoiniki.

The scientific laboratories of the reserve, a hotel for scientific personnel, a park of vehicles for working in the zone are located here.

A variety of animals and plants that can survive in this climatic zone have been brought to the territory of the reserve with strict protection - a kind of "Noah's Ark", where scientists conduct research, studying life in conditions of increased background and minimal human intervention. The value of such research is unique; there is no other place like it on Earth.

Movement in the zone is carried out along several roads, which are maintained by the administration.

The rest of the roads for more than a quarter of a century have fallen into disrepair not without the help of the workers of the reserve in order to prevent outsiders. So, on some liquidated roads there is a chance to run into specially hidden harrows with their teeth to the top - a surprise for poachers.

But the existing roads in the zone are asphalted and in good condition. Their distinguishing feature is the lack of markup.

Chernobyl bison

A few kilometers from Babchyn to the center of the zone is another checkpoint with the Ukrainian name "Maidan". There is a bison nest nearby.

After the creation of the reserve, bison were brought here from Belovezhskaya Pushcha, and over the next years they multiplied several times. In the Chernobyl bison forest, a forester's house is fenced, around which forest dwellers gather in winter.

About sad

All villages in the zone have long been looted. They were robbed mainly by former residents, some of whom were relocated to nearby relatively clean places.

Gradually robbed. When the population was evacuated in 1986, they explained that they would return home in a few months. Often, families left with small bags, leaving their homes with acquired property under the protection of a padlock and a paper sticker with a local police stamp.

Someone settled nearby in Khoiniki or Bragin, others - 400 kilometers away in the north of Belarus, and someone skidded to the Moscow region.

Later, those who settled near the Chernobyl zone had the opportunity, legally or not quite, to take their property out of there. Along the way, they took the property of neighbors.

So, a resident of Khoiniki, talking about the Chernobyl migrants and pointing to the houses, explained: “I took out this dozen bicycles from there, that woman dragged chandeliers, from that house brought several refrigerators and TVs…”.

After 10-15 years after the disaster, in the cellars of abandoned villages one could see homemade seamings. Now they are not.

Some houses manage to remove galvanized sheet from the roof. And from the situation there was something that is not of practical value for the local population.

Closer to the center of the zone, houses were looted a little less. The remnants of the situation show when life ended here - newspapers from the first days of May 1986 with holiday congratulations from the Central Committee of the CPSU, bottles of vodka with a price of 5 rubles were left in the houses. 30 kopecks, glass milk bottles, Pepsi-Cola, etc.

It was very interesting to find abandoned photographs, and sometimes negative black-and-white photographic films, which recorded the life of the village.

Of the items of folk life, ceramic jugs often come across, and in the pantry I somehow saw bast shoes and a skein of bast.

Museum

The resettled villages are marked with memorial stones indicating the name, the number of people living there and the time of resettlement.

On their own initiative, the employees of the reserve made an excellent museum in Babchin from objects of folk life. It is a pity that it is formally located on the territory of the restricted zone, and you cannot visit it without a special pass.

Chernobyl cemeteries

If the villages in the zone are dead, then some cemeteries are active. They bury those who once lived in these places. Once a year, several days on Radunitsa - the day of commemoration of the dead - is a day off in Belarus, cemeteries in the zone are open for free visits from 8 to 18 hours.

At the entrance to the checkpoint, the data of the driver, his car, the number of passengers are rewritten and, according to the driver, the name of the former settlement where the car is heading is recorded.

The latter is done for the safety of visitors. If something happens to the car, the administration will know where to look. Cellular communication in the area at the heights of human growth is practically non-existent.

These days, employees of the reserve, police and the Ministry of Emergency Situations are on duty at the cemeteries of large villages, whose main task is to monitor fire safety.

Formally, on the days of Radunitsa, it is allowed to visit only cemeteries without the right to walk around an abandoned village. But in reality, the days of Radunitsa are the only opportunity for most people to see the Belarusian Chernobyl zone.

The employees of the reserve constantly maintain military burials in order. Moreover, in this matter they overdo it a little - they decorated the sculptural compositions with colored paints, which is why the monuments began to resemble giant children's toys.

When leaving the zone - dosimetric control of the vehicle. If the background is exceeded, the car is sent to the sink of the reserve. Another inspection of the trunk - it is forbidden to take anything out of the zone. However, everything valuable has long been taken out.

On Radunitsa, in the cemeteries of abandoned villages, those who once lived here gather, and who are now scattered in different parts of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Others have not seen each other for a quarter of a century. Someone brings children, and even grandchildren, showing them the huts where they once lived, and where only distant generations can live safely.

I remember how a man took his granddaughter along the khmyznyak, telling that here was the main street of the village of Borshchevka. Showing the looted house, he said that her grandmother lived here. Entering another looted house, wiping away a tear, he recalled how he loved to lie on this stove as a child.

And when from some house I brought a left marriage certificate to a man with a photograph of a girl, he beamed: "Once I courted her!"

Krasnoselye

For more than a quarter of a century in the forbidden zone, nature has returned to its original state without human intervention.

Rural yards are overgrown with hmyznyak so that in summer the houses are almost invisible. On the road you can often meet wild boars, roe deer, foxes, wolves, elks. Lots of snakes and vipers.

Here I noticed an interesting feature - storks do not settle in non-residential villages. From the territory of Ukraine, where poachers had more freedom due to the weakness of protection, several Przewalski's horses, which were once brought to Ukraine, moved to Belarus across the Pripyat River.

But no one has seen the famous Chernobyl mutants with which "sofa travelers" like to scare people.

When I talked about this topic with the biologists of the reserve, they said that under conditions of increased radiation, some organs in animals begin to work differently. When asked whether it was good or bad, they answered that it was neither good nor bad, but simply different.

The closer to the epicenter of the zone, the higher the level of radiation. If at the border of the zone in Babchin the radiometer shows about 50 microR / h, then in the area of ​​the village of Krasnoselye - about 200 microR / h, and in some places up to 1000 microR / h.

Krasnoselye is located on a small sandy hill near Pripyat. On the mound there is a geodetic signal, from where you can see the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and several high-rise buildings of the city of Pripyat, which are 23 kilometers away.

This place has a warning sign for high plutonium contamination. Plutonium-241 gradually decays into americium-241, which is highly soluble in water.

Standing on the observation deck of a 30-meter tower and surveying the vast plain unsuitable for human life in the coming centuries, which was made by such a barely visible power unit on the horizon, you begin to realize that a peaceful atom is not a toy.

Masany

Masany - that was the name of a small village on the very border with Ukraine, which runs along the edge of the village. Before the disaster, 21 families lived here. During the war, the Nazis tried to destroy the Masans, killing almost all the inhabitants. The village survived the war.

Once upon a time, some residents rode bicycles to work at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant or in Pripyat. From Masanov to the fourth power unit no more than 14 kilometers. If decontamination took place near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant with the removal of the top layer of soil, then in the Masanov area, hot particles remained untouched. Here is one of the highest levels of radiation pollution on planet Earth.

And it was here in 1994 that it was decided to create a scientific station to control the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. A preserved house was chosen, the top layer of soil was removed from the adjacent territory, and a clean one was brought in instead. A water well was drilled and conditions were created for a relatively safe life. A meteorological site was also built.

With the closure of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, observation of flora and fauna became a priority at Masana station. The area surrounding Masany very successfully combines all the existing features of the Belarusian Polissya: near the Pripyat River with small channels and coastal lakes, swamps, low sand dunes, pine and deciduous forests, a field.

Two scientists constantly live in Masan on a rotational basis for 10-12 days a month. Despite the presence of their own well, they prefer to use imported water here.

Previously, the village of Masany received electricity from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Now the station is powered by solar panels and a gas generator. Basically, electricity is needed for lighting, the operation of a small TV, radio station and laptops. Due to the low power supply, all equipment and lighting at the station was switched to 12 V.

In addition to scientists, a dog and a cat live permanently at the station. Boars and other wild animals periodically visit them.

Employee Andrei Razdorskikh

From the observation tower, especially in the afternoon, the buildings of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the houses of Pripyat, the huge receiving antenna of the abandoned station of the Chernobyl-2 over-the-horizon location are clearly visible. At night, among the dark non-residential area, the glow of illumination over the Chernobyl looks especially bright.

And among other things, the observation tower in Masan serves as a place to access the Internet - a kind of "high-level" Internet cafe, where you have to climb with a laptop.

The conditions at the Masana scientific station are peculiar, and so is the humor.

The paths along which employees often move are paved with wooden decks. On the porch in front of the entrance to the house there is a recess with water for washing off dust from shoes.

The background here is one of the highest in the Chernobyl zone, higher than near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The fact is that the territory immediately adjacent to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was carefully decontaminated. Contaminated soil was buried, clean soil was brought to its place. The same is done with asphalt. A high background near the Chernobyl NPP gives gamma radiation penetrating through the walls of the "shelter object" - the sarcophagus.

And at a distance of several kilometers from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the hot particles of the reactor contents remained intact in the upper soil layer. In other places in Masan my radiometer showed 5000 microR/h.

The record background, according to scientists, did not go to measure it myself - 15,000 μR / h a few hundred meters from the scientific station near a dried-up small oak tree, where a microscopic hot particle lies. This oak tree is well known to Belarusian radiologists visiting the zone. And in the first days after the disaster in the nearest villages, the background was much higher.

Once one of the scientists said that when he really wanted fresh fish, despite its high radioactivity, he caught it in a small lake. Due to the fact that strontium-90 is not excreted from the body, it was necessary to thoroughly clean it from the bones, where strontium accumulates.

Fish have an excess of the norm for cesium-137 by tens or even hundreds of times. But cesium is well excreted from the body, especially by the use of pectin. The lover of fresh fish had to lie down on marshmallows and marmalade for two weeks.

If you bring elk antlers from these places, scientists advise varnishing them. When asked, they are surprised: "Is it really incomprehensible? The horns are full of strontium, which gives beta radiation, and in this way it decreases." How did you not think of it yourself? However, experts advise for greater safety to keep such horns at a distance of one and a half meters from you.

Tulgovichi

The village of Tulgovichi, Khoiniki district, has long become a landmark and a place of pilgrimage for filming journalists.

The village is located more than 50 kilometers from the nuclear power plant and was resettled in 1991. But eight, mostly elderly residents, refused to leave their homes. The authorities did not insist.

In the village, they left a working power transmission line, a wired telephone connection, a mobile shop comes here once a week, a postal car bringing pensions, and a doctor regularly visits them.

Legally, that part of a large village where people live is not a Chernobyl zone forbidden for free visiting. Also, formally, the inhabitants of Tulgovich do not have the right to go beyond their "island" without an appropriate permit.

To visit Tulgovich, relatives of the "natives" living there also have to issue passes. And the villagers themselves go few places - their age affects, leading a normal village life - they work in gardens, fumble with livestock, fish on a small river that flows through the village, or go fishing on Pripyat.

Grandfather Ivan Shemenok became famous for making excellent moonshine, which the reserve staff regularly bought from him, and in such quantities that the management of the reserve had to fine the grandfather.

In Tulgovichi, I happened to see domestic pigs grazing among abandoned houses, in which, judging by the thick wool and large fangs, one of the parents was a wild individual.

About 10 years ago, an Orthodox priest from Khoiniki tried to turn an empty house in Tulgovichi into a church. The candlestick replaced a basin of sand, the icons were from the printing house, the towels were local.

Due to the small number of parishioners, the temple did not provide income, it was inconvenient for the priest from Khoiniki to travel here. As a result, the church was empty.

The radiation background in Tulgovichi is about 100 microR/h at a rate of 20-25. For the Chernobyl zone, this is not much. Food products grown here and the meat of local animals are above the norm, but this does not prevent visiting relatives from taking away local delicacies "from their grandfather".

During the years after Chernobyl life, the population of Tulgovich decreased by two people. In 10-15 years, this village will become non-residential.

In 2013, the population of Tulgovichi was reduced to three people. - Approx. website.

Borshchevka and Dronki

And these are photos from the village of Borshchevka. In the picture with snakes - an ordinary and rare black viper.

And now - the village of Dronki. This woman saw her home for the first time in over 20 years. The house has no roof, it was stolen.

Radunitsa in Dronki. The graves in this area are decorated with towels. Firefighters make sure that there are no fires on this day.

About the present and the future

A few more people formally live on the territory of the Chernobyl zone, but this is in the villages bordering the zone. In the late 1980s - early 1990s, during the turbulent times of the collapse of the USSR and interethnic conflicts, many empty houses on the outskirts of the Chernobyl zone were settled by refugees from many regions of the former USSR.

Then the authorities did not pay attention to the legality of residence - the village needed working hands. Among these refugees there were many good specialists, including doctors.

There are no mysterious self-settlers secretly living in abandoned villages in the depths of the Belarusian part of the Chernobyl zone. It is enough to look at the condition of those houses to understand that you will not live there for a long time.

Only a professionally trained person can secretly live in the depths of a zone without power supply, without roads for a long time, taking serious measures to hide himself, and older people cannot do it.

Otherwise, the robinson will be deported very quickly by the reserve's guards. Yes, and hiding from the state is easier in other places than in a protected area, where the smoke of a fire immediately attracts the attention of the guards.

The probable future of the Belarusian part of the Chernobyl zone is seen as follows. In some places, the zone will be reduced due to a decrease in the background. After a quarter of a century of desolation, the fields are plowed up near the very border of the zone, in the adjacent villages, abandoned houses are demolished clean according to the "green lawn" option according to the improvement program.

More polluted places will remain uninhabited for many generations to come.

Masao Yoshida died of esophageal cancer at the age of 58.

From Kyiv to the Chernobyl exclusion zone (ChEZ), most of which is located in the Kiev region, by car can be reached in one and a half to two hours. There are several villages and villages on this site, and closer to the zone there is only a forest. At the Dityatki checkpoint, visitors are met by police officers, three red cats and a red dog. There is a kind of border here - a fence with barbed wire goes deep into the field from the checkpoint. Police officers check passport data with lists sent in advance, before the trip. Legally, only local workers, relatives of self-settlers or tourists strictly with accompanying persons can enter the zone. In 2009, according to Forbes magazine, this place was included in the list of 12 most exotic tourist destinations along with Antarctica and North Korea. The level of radiation in some places exceeds the permissible by 30 times, but this does not stop those who want to look at the largest monument to a man-made disaster. Over the past ten years, 40,000 tourists have visited the ChEZ. The flow increased significantly after the release in 2007 of the popular computer game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, which takes place in the territories adjacent to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Since then, more and more people began to enter here illegally: every year about 400 stalkers are detained, who are punished with a fine of 400 hryvnia (about 1.2 thousand rubles) for an administrative violation.

The territories of the Ukrainian SSR, the Byelorussian SSR and the RSFSR exposed to radiation contamination as a result of the Chernobyl accident were divided into four categories: the exclusion zone, the resettlement zone, the zone of residence with the right to resettlement and the zone of residence with a preferential socio-economic status. The exclusion zone includes areas from which mandatory evacuation of the population was carried out in 1986 and 1987. The total area of ​​the Russian exclusion zone - 310 sq. km, other categories of radiation hazard territories also include 11.5 thousand sq. km.

In Russia, the exclusion zone is located in the Bryansk region, where there were four villages with a total population of 186 people.

In neighboring Belarus, this zone is much wider and includes territories where 22,000 people used to live in 92 settlements. In 1988, the Polessky State Radiation-Ecological Reserve was created on these contaminated lands, where there is an experimental apiary and a garden, where horses are bred. Also in this area live populations of bison, lynx, Przewalski's horse.

In Ukraine, the exclusion zone (radius - 30 km) is located in the districts of the Kiev and Zhytomyr regions. The total area of ​​the territory, where before the accident there were 94 settlements with 116 thousand inhabitants, is almost 2.6 thousand square meters. km, a little more than Moscow. The length of the outer perimeter with wire barriers, checkpoints and dosimetric checkpoints is about 440 km (approximately the distance between Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod). Within the ChEZ, areas with a special access regime have been identified - a ten-kilometer zone and the Chernobyl site itself.

Chernobyl.
12 km to Chernobyl

Today Chernobyl is a city forever frozen in the days of the Soviet Union. Small, with clean empty green streets, with inconspicuous gray two-story buildings, Chernobyl is half asleep. Before the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the population here was approximately 13 thousand people, now it is about 4 thousand (in the entire ChEZ - 5 thousand). Occasionally you can meet a passerby, several times a day an old Soviet bus for workers passes through the streets. There are few residential buildings here - a couple of dozen, mostly concentrated in the center. But the infrastructure of the city, despite the almost complete alienation of the settlement, is developing, albeit very slowly. The tourist flow here gives rise to its supply and demand - the city begins to take on a second life.

In the building of the inactive bus station and near the fire station there are shops of a rural type, where they sell mainly essential products (including a wide range of alcohol). They can even pay with credit cards and buy souvenirs: T-shirts with the inscription "Chernobyl", "apocalyptic" magnets with the image of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and a nuclear fungus, and pink pens with a radiation icon. A couple of hotels have been opened in the city: one is in a converted old hostel (small three-four-bed rooms), the second is in the house where the party workers lived (a seven-bed room in a renovated three-room apartment). There is a large Soviet canteen, and the Desyatka cafe has recently opened, where you can eat cheaply and sit in a bar with Wi-Fi. There is still a curfew here, but it seems to be perceived by the locals as an obsolete formality.

Two grocery stores have been opened at different ends of the building of the former bus station. When choosing which one to go to after the working shift, the locals are guided by the length of the queue in each of them.

Chernobyl is inhabited mainly by foresters, ecologists, scientists, personnel serving the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and the personnel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, who protect the 30-kilometer zone from the penetration of illegal immigrants. It is in Chernobyl that the main enterprises engaged in maintaining the territory in an environmentally safe state are located. They control the content of radionuclides in the water of the Pripyat River, its tributaries and air. They work in Chernobyl on a rotational basis - "4 for 3": on Monday, the staff is taken by bus to the city, and on Thursday they are taken back to the "mainland". For some specialists, there is a different schedule - "15 to 15": two weeks in the zone, the rest for half a month at home. People come to work here from different regions of Ukraine, but most here are from the Kiev region. 22-year-old Dasha from the Vinnitsa region works in a Chernobyl cafe because during the crisis she could not get a job anywhere. Chef Dima, on the contrary, purposefully went to work here because of the high salary by Ukrainian standards. The bonus to the basic salary is given here because of the harmful working conditions. In the evenings, in the cafe "Desyatka" locals traditionally gather to have dinner, watch TV and discuss the latest news - about the events in eastern Ukraine, Euromaidan and the Crimean referendum.

The founding date of Chernobyl is considered to be 1193, when this place was first mentioned in the Ipatiev Chronicle. With the formation of the Commonwealth in 1569, the city became part of it. Later, in the 18th century, it became one of the largest centers of Hasidism in Ukraine. In 1793, Chernobyl was annexed to the Russian Empire as a place in the Radomyshl district of the Kiev province, and later became a major river transshipment point. In 1921, Chernobyl became part of the Ukrainian SSR, and two years later - the center of the district of the same name (it received city status in 1941). Since 1990, these places have attracted pilgrims - religious Jews, equipping the graves of tzaddiks (righteous people) buried in this land. Since 2001, services have been held in the city in the only functioning Orthodox parish in the exclusion zone - St. Elias Church.

Reactor

The idea to use the "peaceful atom" in the service of the national economy of the USSR was first expressed by Academician Kurchatov, the creator of the Soviet atomic bomb. In the 1970s, active construction of nuclear power plants began in the Soviet Union, and ten years later, nuclear power plants accounted for 15% of all electricity generated in the country. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was the pride of the Soviet Union: by 1986 it was the most powerful in the country and one of the most powerful nuclear power plants in the world. The USSR equated its successes in nuclear energy with successes in space exploration. No one doubted that the future of energy belongs to nuclear power plants.

The construction of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant began in March 1970. The station became the third in the USSR with graphite-water reactors of the RBMK-1000 type after the Leningrad (started up in 1973) and Kursk (1976) nuclear power plants. Chernobyl belonged to a single-circuit type of nuclear power plant: the steam supplied to the turbines was formed directly in the reactor by boiling the coolant (water) passing through it. In total, four power units were put into operation at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1978–1984. The construction of the third stage (the fifth and sixth power units) was stopped in 1987. At the time of the accident, the station generated 150.2 billion kWh of electricity, and over the subsequent period until complete decommissioning on December 15, 2000, another 158.6 billion kWh. By 2000, 9.5 thousand people worked at the station.

Currently, there are 11 reactors of the so-called Chernobyl type (RBMK-1000) in operation in the world, all at Russian nuclear power plants: Kursk, Leningrad and Smolensk. Another nuclear power plant with such reactors, Ignalina in Lithuania, is currently not in use. One reactor of this type has not been completed at the Kursk NPP and, most likely, will never be put into operation. After the accident at the fourth power unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, two more serious incidents occurred at stations equipped with RBMK-1000. In 1991, there was a fire in the engine room of the second unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in 1992 - a rupture of the fuel channel at the Leningrad nuclear power plant. There were no dead.

How the accident developed

April 25, 1986, 1:06 a.m. (hereinafter, local time). At the Chernobyl nuclear power plant for scheduled repairs, the shutdown of the fourth power unit began, during which an experiment was planned. It was supposed to show whether the mechanical inertia of rotation of the turbine generator rotor could be used to generate electricity for a short time during a sudden shutdown of the reactor.

April 26, 0:05. The reactor power level of 700 MW planned for the experiment was reached, but the power continued to decrease, falling to 30 MW in half an hour. At this level, an immediate shutdown of the reactor was required, but the operator removed the reaction-inhibiting rods from the reactor in an attempt to restore power.

1:23. The experiment began at an unacceptably low power of 200 MW. A few seconds later, the power of the reactor increased dramatically by 100 times. The operator pressed the emergency button, which was supposed to shut down the reactor.

1:24. The first thermal explosion occurred, knocking out the upper part of the reactor - a plate weighing 1 thousand tons. A few seconds later, the second explosion completely destroyed the reactor, releasing 190 tons of radioactive substances into the atmosphere, including isotopes of uranium, plutonium, iodine and cesium. Two employees of the station were killed, more than 30 fires arose.

1:28. The special fire department for the protection of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (SFC-2), which received a signal about a fire, began extinguishing the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Auxiliary fire guards also headed to the station. The fight against the fire lasted five hours, 15 fire brigades from Pripyat, Kyiv and the surrounding area were involved. Rescuers did not have proper protection.

11:00. Chernobyl director Viktor Bryukhanov reported to the second secretary of the Kiev regional committee about the explosion and fire, lying that the radiation situation in the city of Pripyat and at the nuclear power plant was not dangerous.

20:20. A government commission headed by Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers Boris Shcherbina arrived at the crash site.

22:00. The Ministry of Health of the USSR decided on the need for an emergency evacuation of Pripyat.

April 27, 13:00. The Pripyat radio broadcasting network announced the gathering and temporary evacuation of the city's residents. 50 thousand people were taken out of the city with almost no belongings: they were sure that they would return soon. Helicopters began to fill the destroyed reactor with absorbing materials, including boron carbide.

April 28th. The announcer of the Vremya program read out the first official TASS message: “There was an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. One of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the incident. The victims received the necessary assistance. A government commission has been set up to investigate the incident.” The Foreign Ministry held a press conference, telling foreign journalists about the disaster.

May 1. In Kyiv, where the level of radiation exceeded the permissible limits, mass celebrations were held on the occasion of May Day.

May 2. The evacuation of the population began, first from the 10-kilometer zone, and two days later - from the 30-kilometer zone.

May 8 Large-scale decontamination work began, to which people and equipment were transferred from different parts of the USSR.

May 14. Mikhail Gorbachev spoke on central television with an official statement about the accident.

Immediately after the explosion of the reactor, 31 people died - station employees and firefighters. Most of the station's workers died within three months, having received radiation in doses of more than 4 thousand mSv (lethal dose). The number of those who subsequently died from radiation-induced cancers is still unknown and remains the subject of fierce debate. 530 thousand people received doses from 10 to 1 thousand mSv. These were people who had been in the affected area for a long time: soldiers, rescuers, technicians and employees of the nuclear power plant. According to the most conservative statistics of the Chernobyl Forum, 9 thousand people have died and about 200 thousand people suffer from diseases caused by the Chernobyl accident. According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Health from 2005, from 1987 to 2004, the number of only Ukrainians who died due to the consequences of the accident reached 530 thousand people. In 1991, a law was passed on the social protection of citizens affected by the disaster. To date, about 7 million people in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine have the status of Chernobyl victims.

The pond around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is an artificial reservoir that was created to cool the plant's reactors. It has a huge amount of fish. Employees from neighboring facilities and tourists, finding themselves here, do not miss the opportunity to feed two-meter catfish.

Elimination of the consequences of the accident

The first measure to eliminate the consequences of the accident for the population was iodine prophylaxis, which, however, was promptly carried out only in Pripyat - on the day of the accident. On April 27, the evacuation of the population began from it, and only in May - from the 10- and 30-kilometer exclusion zones around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. In total, in the spring and summer of 1986, out of 400 thousand people living in exclusion zones and territories of "strict radiation control", 116 thousand were evacuated, in subsequent years another 270 thousand people were resettled.

In May 1986, special measures were launched to decontaminate settlements and equipment in the exclusion zone, which included the sanitization of buildings and streets, the removal of topsoil, and the disposal of contaminated equipment.

At the same time, a specially organized construction department No. 605 of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building began to build a sarcophagus around the emergency reactor (the Shelter object). By November 1986, the construction of the sarcophagus was completed. Over 100 thousand cubic meters of concrete and 6.8 thousand tons of metal structures were used for its construction. Up to 95% of the fuel that was in the reactor at the time of the accident remains inside the Shelter.

The volume of radioactive materials is 185–200 tons with a total activity of 16 million curies. At the same time, since 1986, no more than 60% of the area of ​​the Shelter object has been examined, the rest of the premises are inaccessible due to dangerous radiation fields and due to barriers resulting from the explosion and collapse of internal floors.

350 thousand people took part in the initial work to eliminate the consequences of the accident in 1986-1987, the total number of liquidators is estimated at 600 thousand people.

In total, in 1986-1991, the USSR spent $18 billion to eliminate the accident, 35% of this amount was allocated for social assistance to the victims, and 17% was spent on resettlement. The station itself was finally decommissioned only in 2000.

The need to convert the built sarcophagus into a safer structure was thought back in 1989. Then the employees of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy put forward the concept of building a new structure over the existing "Shelter" to completely isolate the contents of the destroyed power unit from the external environment. In 1991, additional options for complete backfilling, complete disassembly and pouring of the sarcophagus with concrete were proposed. But following the results of an international competition for projects to transform the Shelter into an environmentally safe system, Ukraine in 1996 finally abandoned the creation of a storage facility at the site of the fourth power unit, despite criticism from Russian specialists.

In 1998, with the support of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and a group of international donors, the implementation of the Shelter Implementation Plan (SIP) began, including the construction of a new safe confinement (NSC, or Shelter-2 ”) and storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel.

In 2004, a tender was announced for the construction of the NSC, which was won on August 10, 2007 by the American engineering consortium Bechtel-Battelle Memorial, and the specially created JV Novarka became the contractor for the project (subcontractors are Italian, American and Turkish companies). The project is a complex that includes a protective dome-arch and equipment for extracting radioactive materials from the destroyed power unit. The arch (height - 108 m, length - 162 m, width - 257 m) to ensure the safety of workers is not built over the damaged reactor itself, but on a specially equipped site away from it. After work on it is completed, the NSC weighing 29 thousand tons will be pulled over the rails on the old sarcophagus and sealed. Unlike its predecessor, the new sarcophagus is designed for 100 years of use.

The confinement was supposed to be put into operation by October 15, 2015 (the end date of the contract), but the completion date for its construction has already been repeatedly shifted, including due to funding problems. Initially, the cost of the entire SIP project was estimated at €550 million, but by 2011 it had grown to €1.6 billion, of which about €935 million would be spent on the sarcophagus alone. By this time, €864 million had already been received from the EBRD and donor countries, and at the international summit, timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the accident, Kiev managed to raise most of the missing funds - another €550 million, which, according to the assurances of the Ukrainian side, will allow the construction of a new sarcophagus to be completed according to plan.

Information on the progress of construction as of April 26, 2016:
In March 2015, EBRD Director of Nuclear Safety Vince Nowak said that about €615 million more is needed to complete the construction work. Commissions, and the remaining €100 will be added by other donor countries.

In September 2015, the French companies Bouygues and Vinci completed the preliminary assembly of the arched sarcophagus for the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The arch is larger than the Stade de France in Paris. The height of the new sarcophagus is equivalent to the height of a 30-story building. The structure will arrive in Chernobyl in a disassembled state, it will be reassembled directly on the territory of the nuclear power plant.

The unloading of damaged nuclear fuel from the first and second power units of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is scheduled until the end of May 2016, after which the status of nuclear installations will be removed from the units. At the station, dismantling work is underway in the engine rooms, on auxiliary equipment. More than 70% of equipment and systems have been decommissioned. The fourth power unit is planned to be covered with a new protective structure in November 2016. All work should be completed by the end of 2017.

The delay in construction could become critical: the Shelter's service life limit ends in 2016. The threat of destruction of the old sarcophagus is real. So, on February 12, 2013, due to the accumulated snow, ten panels of the wall and the light roof of the turbine hall of the fourth power unit partially collapsed. Work on the construction of a new sarcophagus was frozen for a week until the French builders were convinced of the safety of their continuation.

The final dismantling of the fourth power unit is scheduled for 2065. By this time, the complete dismantling of the reactor installations, the site cleanup and the disposal of fuel-containing materials located in the fourth power unit should be completed. How exactly this will happen is still unclear. On the website of the state specialized enterprise "Chernobyl NPP", with reference to the international coordination group of experts, it is explained that it is not advisable to develop a fuel extraction strategy for the time being, since more advanced and safer technologies for managing high-level radioactive waste may appear. Therefore, it was tentatively decided to postpone the extraction until the time when the repository for the final disposal of the waste is created, "that is, for several decades."

Pripyat.
3 km from Chernobyl

At the entrance to Pripyat, the dosimeter starts beeping more and more often. At the fork there is an entrance stele "Pripyat 1970" (one of the main places for tourists to take photos), and next to it is an inconspicuous yellow sign "rudy lis" ("red forest"). On this site - "eternal autumn": the trees look dried up, and the leaves are a pale orange color. During the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the main release of radioactive dust occurred in the direction of Pripyat. In a matter of days, the forest turned red, after which part of it was cut down and buried.

Before entering the city, you need to go through another checkpoint - "Lelev", where the guides give the guards permission documents to visit these places. The main recommendations for tourists: stay together, do not enter emergency rooms, it is advisable to wear gloves, do not touch anything, carry a dosimeter and do not eat anything. Despite the fact that over the past three decades, the degree of radioactive contamination has decreased, radioactive dust can be anywhere: underfoot, on walls, on trees.

Pripyat at one time was a model Soviet city with a well-thought-out self-sufficient infrastructure. 15 kindergartens, 5 schools, 25 shops, cafes and restaurants, a hospital, a river port, a hotel, a Palace of Culture, a cinema, a swimming pool were built here. Four industrial enterprises operated in the city, including the Jupiter plant, which produced tape drives for tape recorders (household and special purposes). It was prestigious to work and live here, and salaries at that time were quite high.

The city of Pripyat was founded on February 4, 1970 on the river of the same name, a tributary of the Dnieper, 18 km north of Chernobyl as a place of residence for workers of a nuclear power plant under construction at a distance of 3 km (since 1979 - a city of regional subordination). The construction of the city and the station was declared an all-Union shock Komsomol construction project, so the bulk of the townspeople were Komsomol members from all over the USSR. By 1986, the population of Pripyat was almost 50,000. people, the average age of residents is 26 years. The master plan for the development of the city provided for the possibility of accommodating up to 80 thousand people.

Today, nature captures the territory of an abandoned city - it seems that these houses have "grown" in the forest. Birch trees grow on the roofs and first floors of many buildings, branches stick out through the windows in apartments, birds make nests on balconies and in telephone booths. The most impressive sign of the victory of nature is a football stadium with rotten wooden stands, high rusty spotlights, and in the center, instead of a field, a forest has grown. The guides say that the builders of the confinement, who live in Slavutych and travel to work by train, have a game - to count moose from the window. Before that, their colleagues said that wild boars could occasionally run through the main square of Pripyat in winter.

The nature in these parts is rich: bears, otters, badgers, muskrats, lynxes, deer, Przewalski's horses and wolves live here. Stories about two-headed animals roaming the exclusion zone are myths. German and American scientists who conducted research here came to the conclusion that despite the high radiation background, mutations in animals are observed in approximately the same percentage (in some cases slightly higher) as under normal conditions.

In Pripyat, perhaps, there is not a single house where marauders have not visited. The city remained untouched only for the first few weeks after the Chernobyl accident. After that, furniture and household items were taken away from here, in some houses iron railings were even sawn down near the stairs for scrap metal. During the period of urgent evacuation, the townspeople simply did not have the opportunity to take valuables with them. In the bedroom of one of the apartments we enter, among a pile of scattered things and rubbish, you can find notes on chemistry of a junior student with neat diagrams drawn with a felt-tip pen; in the kitchen, dusty, yellowed cookery magazines and an overturned stove; in the hallway - old women's shoes; and in a large empty room - a dusty, torn sofa. Leaving home and never returning - many of those who left the city after the accident did not realize that they would never live here again.

But there are residents of Pripyat who, years later, return here to see their native lands again. One of the guides says that once a former resident came to Pripyat and went to the school where he studied in 1986. He wandered around the classrooms for a long time and left two hours later with his diary, in which there was a mark "5" in the schedule of subjects dated April 25, on Friday - one day before the Chernobyl accident.

One of the five schools in the city is in a dilapidated state, and it is still possible to go to the rest. Hundreds of Soviet textbooks, notebooks for teachers to check, old maps, models of world attractions (including the Kremlin), flasks with preserved fish for biology lessons remained in the classrooms here. Children's toys are everywhere - dolls, mutilated by time, are perhaps one of the most popular symbols of tragedy. In the 1980s, there was a boom in the birth rate: young residents, given their level of well-being, could afford to expand their families.

At the time of the accident, about 20–30% of the city's population were children. In the kindergarten, in the playroom, there are frozen scenes: dolls opposite each other, iron cars standing in a row, constructions made of cubes, shabby soft toys and a plastic Olympic bear.

The hospital of Pripyat, along with a school and a kindergarten, is perhaps one of the main attractions for tourists. Glass flasks, faded medical journals, sanitary "ducks" are scattered in dusty, dilapidated corridors. In the hospital wards there are rusty springy beds, in the operating room there is a table with overhanging lanterns. In a large waiting room with a hospital schedule on the wall, the inscription "Today in treatment: ...", below are empty cells in the list of surnames. The first victims - station workers, firefighters - were brought here after the Chernobyl accident. On the first floor, there is still a balaclava of one of the liquidators, which (at a radiation rate of 20-30 microR/h) emits about 10,000 microR/h.

Excursions to the exclusion zone have been officially allowed since 2010 by the Ukrainian authorities. But in 2011, a dispute broke out between the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the Prosecutor General's Office: the latter tried to ban trips to the exclusion zone, but the rescuers seemed to be able to agree. The logic of the prosecutors and the guards is clear: Pripyat is collapsing, the buildings, although strong, turn into dust, the famous Ferris wheel is completely rusted, and all this can fall on the visitors’ heads at any moment. No one is going to restore the city, and in the event of the death of a tourist, the authorities and guides will have to answer.

The only hospital for adults in the city is MSCh-126. It had departments of surgery, dentistry, and a maternity hospital. Now this place is one of the most charged in the city: immediately after the Chernobyl accident, victims were brought here, whose clothes were covered in radioactive dust.

DK "Energetik" is already in disrepair: the roof is in holes. True, the murals on the walls have been preserved in the foyer of the building. At the end of April 1986, the city was preparing for the May 1 celebrations. Here you can see portraits of party officials and find old Edison sound equipment.

In Pripyat, there are a lot of Soviet symbols in general: a sickle and a hammer on lampposts, iron cubes with the image of Komsomol members, old soda machines, a line from the USSR anthem “Lenin’s party is the power of the people” that almost came down from the wall of a nine-story building. He is leading us to the triumph of communism.”

Many tourists, who are greeted over the main square by “Let the atom be a worker, not a soldier,” are interested in these places as a kind of “monument” to socialist realism or Soviet industrialization. Others are attracted to Pripyat as a place of a local "apocalypse", where after a man-made disaster a person will never be able to live.

Now there are only a few operating facilities in the city - a special laundry, a station for iron removal and water fluoridation, and a garage for special equipment. They are served on a rotational basis. Self-settlers do not live in Pripyat.

A few years ago, graffiti appeared on houses and premises in Pripyat, which, apparently, are made by stalker artists. Some refer to this as vandalism, others believe that with graffiti, the city becomes an art object and attracts more interest.

The city had 25 stores with a total area of ​​10 thousand square meters, 27 canteens, cafes, restaurants for 5.5 thousand guests.

After the accident, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant still continued to operate, so it was decided to build a new satellite city of the station to serve it. On October 2, 1986, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR signed a decree on the construction of the city of Slavutych. The first move-in order was issued on March 28, 1988. Slavutych is the youngest city in Ukraine with a population of 25,000. a person administratively subordinated to the Kiev region, although it is completely located on the territory of the Chernihiv region. The average salary in the city (2013) is 5653 hryvnias (22.6 thousand rubles), pension - 3587 hryvnias (14.3 thousand rubles), both indicators are one and a half to two times higher than those in Ukraine as a whole. Since 1999, the special economic zone "Slavutich" has been operating in the city (the preferential tax regime here is calculated until January 1, 2020). This system was introduced to mitigate the socio-economic consequences of the shutdown in 2000 of the city-forming enterprise - the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. As of 2012, the special economic zone attracted $42.7 million in investments, including $11.8 million from foreign ones.

MTS Kopachi

In a ten-kilometer zone, it is almost impossible to find abandoned village houses. Shortly after the accident, the decision was made to demolish and bury the buildings on the contaminated land. Dozens of signs with a radiation hazard symbol can be seen in the fields in this area. In the place of each of them, someone's house is "buried". The exclusion zone has three disposal sites for radioactive waste (RW) and nine temporary containment sites for RW with a total volume of 4.8 million cubic meters.

The machine and tractor station is located near the dug-in village of Kopachi (coincidentally, the word "diggers" is translated as "diggers"). The territory of the base is littered with old agricultural equipment - Niva combines - and equipment that was used in the aftermath of the accident. There is also an engineering obstacle blocking vehicle, with the help of which the “red forest” was demolished.

The "probe" of the IMR-2 barrier vehicle, which was used to destroy the "red forest", now "fonit" up to 12 thousand microR / h (with the norm of only 20). The burial of dead trees and the topsoil was carried out by dozens of special vehicles: first, the trees were felled, then they were raked by bulldozers into trenches about 1 meter deep and covered with "clean" earth. In total, more than 4 thousand cubic meters of radioactive materials were buried in this way.

Camp "Emerald"

In a ten-kilometer zone in a pine forest is the camp "Emerald" - in those days the main entertainment center for children in the entire district. Small green houses with cartoon drawings stand on a hill near the river, in the center of the camp - a stage where the pioneers once performed. All this is reminiscent of a large abandoned summer cottage from the movie "Burnt by the Sun". Tourists and stalkers have every chance to encounter wild animals here.

"Chernobyl-2"

On the road from Pripyat to Chernobyl, a high "fence" is visible far on the horizon - the Chernobyl-2 radar. Until last year, it was forbidden to approach this building even 3 km away. Radar node (RLU) "Chernobyl-2" for a long time was considered a secret, and then - an object of special protection. The height of the radar is 150 m, the width is 750 m. Next to it is a two-story building 1 km long - the facility control center. In Chernobyl-2 there was a radio receiving center of RLU No. 1 and a military camp (RLU No. 2 was located in the Komsomolsk-on-Amur region). Their construction was completed by the mid-1970s as part of the large Project Duga, which was created during the Cold War era as a missile attack warning system to detect ICBM launches from US soil.

In the mid-1970s, radar stations were built near Nikolaev, Komsomolsk-on-Amur and Chernobyl, which together constitute a system for over-the-horizon detection of ballistic missiles (the Duga project).

The first series of electromagnetic broadcasts from the "Duga" was performed on July 4, 1976, after which the ZGRLS began to work on radiation, emitting characteristic signals. These signals, recorded in the West and reminiscent of the sound of a woodpecker's knock, worked in the entire range of short waves (5-35 MHz) and interfered with aviation and maritime services.

The cost of building Chernobyl-2 was estimated at 150 million rubles. The total investment, including the eastern node of the ZGRLS 5N32 "Duga" and the experimental ZGRLS 5N77 "Duga-2" near Nikolaev, exceeded 600 million rubles.

The modernization of the Chernobyl-2 system was planned to be completed by November 1986. After the accident at the nuclear power plant, these territories were deprived of a source of energy and fell into the zone of radioactive contamination. The project was curtailed, the main part of the inhabitants of the military camp was immediately evacuated. Chernobyl-2 remains to this day the only surviving object of the Duga ZGRLS: the antennas in Nikolaev and the Far East have been dismantled.

Cupovatoe.
32 km from Chernobyl

Now, within the boundaries of the exclusion zone in 11 settlements, there are about 300 squatters - people who arbitrarily settled in abandoned houses. In some village one person may live, in another - three or four families. Perhaps the most famous self-settlement of the Chernobyl zone is Ganna's grandmother. True, she is offended by the word “self-settlement”, because she lived here all her life, and then simply returned to her house. The radiation background in this village is now within the normal range, but the ground is still contaminated.

Baba Ganna, 83, lives in the abandoned village of Kupovatoye with her 75-year-old sister, who has been disabled since childhood. They returned almost immediately after the evacuation: Baba Hanna could not get used to urban conditions. There are four more residential courtyards in the vicinity, in one of which their cousin Sophia lives. Baba Ganna has a small household: a kitchen garden, a small garden and 14 chickens. Her problems are familiar to a simple villager: two years ago, in winter, her chickens were covered with snow, and wolves killed her only dog. There are no shops here, but once a week a truck with groceries arrives. She steadfastly endures all difficulties, coping with affairs almost independently. The district police periodically visit the residents, helping them with the housework. Baba Ganna is always happy to have guests, but persistent tourists who want to take a picture with her are jokingly chased away, calling them "maniacs".

Cousins ​​Sophia and Hanna are neighbors.

People began to return to their homes just a few weeks after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant: someone did not understand what radiation was, someone believed that they were simply intimidated, someone did not want to leave their property or simply decided to die at home. In 1986, there were 1,200 self-settlers, now there are four times less. 85% of the people living here are over 60 years old. Children are not born in the exclusion zone, although there is an exception to this rule. On August 25, 1999, the daughter of Maria, the first and only child of the zone, was born to self-settlers Mikhail Vedernikov and Lidia Sovenko. Now she does not live in the ChEZ.

Employees of "Kommersant" at the dosimetric control at the checkpoint "Dityatki" in the ChEZ.
Each of Kommersant's correspondents received 300 micro-roentgens in the exclusion zone in two days. This is equivalent to the dose received during the flight from Moscow to Kyiv.

Text: Artem Galustyan, Anastasia Gorshkova
Photo: Vladimir Shuvaev, Dmitry Kuchev
Video: Dmitry Shelkovnikov
Design, programming and layout: Alexey Dubinin, Anton Zhukov, Alexey Shabrov
Reference materials: Vadim Zaitsev, Kommersant Information Service
Managing editor: Artem Galustyan
Also, Petr Mironenko, Tatyana Mishanina, Yulia Bychkova, Kim Voronin participated in the preparation of the project.

What is the exclusion zone of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant?

The "Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Exclusion Zone" is the officially designated exclusion area around the site of the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

Scientists believe that the release of radioactive substances accelerated the growth of some individuals, and since catfish are long-lived with age, their size reaches unprecedented levels.

More than thirty years have passed since the accident and the animals are already descendants of their irradiated ancestors, but it is still dangerous to eat such fish.

In Chernobyl, you can visit St. Elijah's Church and the castle from the time of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

In Pripyat, the main square is of particular interest.

Interest in it is due to the fact that the amusement park in which the wheel is located never opened.

Its opening was timed to coincide with Labor Day celebrations on May 1, 1986, and the accident occurred five days before the scheduled opening date. All the attractions of the park remained untouched.

It is not possible to dismantle and install them in other parks. They still emit background radiation exceeding the norm by dozens of times.

Pollution of the exclusion zone

The level of radiation (cesium-137, strontium-90, americium-241 and plutonium-239) at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and Pripyat is 2-2.5 times higher than the established norms.

Chernobyl nuclear power plant pollution zone map

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is controlled by State Service of Ukraine for Emergency Situations, while the power plant itself and its sarcophagus (and replacement) are handled separately.

Due to the fact that most of the contaminated territories were still outside the 30-km zone, in the 1990s, settlements gradually began to be resettled (94 in total), since the permissible norms were still exceeded there.

For 6 years, most of the villages were finally resettled. In 1997, this territory was included in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and transferred under the control of the Ministry of Emergency Situations and, accordingly, began to be protected.

Exclusion zone today

There are working shops in the city, there is a hostel and a canteen. Also in the exclusion zone live local residents from among the returnees (up to 500 people).

They are located in several villages of the territory and lead a secluded lifestyle, although there is no other way.

There is no electricity on the territory, as well as no food supply. People who have made the decision to return to their homes are engaged in agriculture, hunting and fishing.

If animals have a lower radiation background and eating them is at least somehow possible, then the soil is very polluted.

Soil pollution is so strong that it takes several thousand years to clean it up. For this reason, growing food in the exclusion zone is a bad idea.

The exclusion zone is a fairly visited object by tourists, people come here from all over the world.

tourist exclusion zone

There are agencies through which you can get to, to Chernobyl or Pripyat, the Rusty Forest and a number of other objects in the exclusion zone.

Rusty or red forest

This is an area of ​​10 square kilometers adjacent to the territory of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

The radioactive substances released into the atmosphere were partially absorbed by the trees, which led to their death, as well as turning them brown-red.

Staining occurred within 30 minutes of the explosion. Some argue that at night there is a glow of dead trees.

As part of the work to clean up the area from radiation contamination, the forest was cut down and buried.

Now the forest is being restored naturally. Radiation loads on pine as a result of the Chernobyl accident occurred during the period of tree growth.

During such a period, the radiosensitivity of plants increases by 1.5-3 times compared with other periods.

The crown of pines is quite dense and is an effective filter, which contributed to the retention of a significant amount of radioactive dust and aerosols in the crowns of these trees.

Pine does not shed needles for 2-3 years, which leads to slow natural cleaning of crowns compared to hardwood trees.

This factor increased the radiation damage of conifers in comparison with other types of trees.

As a result of the release of radioactive substances and the degree of their impact on trees, the climb was divided into several zones:

1. The zone of complete destruction of coniferous species with partial damage to deciduous species (the so-called "Red Forest"). The levels of absorbed doses (according to scientists' calculations) from external gamma irradiation in 1986-1987 amounted to 8000-10000 rad with a maximum exposure dose rate of 500 mR/hour and more. The area of ​​this zone is about 4.5 thousand hectares. In this zone, the above-ground organs of the pine died completely, and the needles acquired a brick color. The entire forest practically “burned down”, accumulating significant amounts of radioactive emissions.
2. The zone of sublethal lesions of the forest in which from 25 to 40% of trees died, and most of the forest undergrowth (1-2.5 m in height) also died. In 90-95% of the trees, young shoots and buds are severely damaged and have died. The absorbed dose is 1000-8000 rad, the exposure dose rate is 200-250 mR/hour. The area of ​​the zone was 12.5 thousand hectares, including pine forests - 3.8 thousand hectares.
3. A zone of medium damage to a pine forest. For this zone, the defeat of mainly young shoots was characteristic, and the needles turned yellow only in certain parts of the branches. There were also slight morphological deviations in the growth of pine, but these plants retained their viability. The absorbed dose is 400-500 rad, the exposure dose rate is 50-200 mR/hour. The area of ​​the third zone was 43.3 thousand hectares, including pine forests - 11.9 thousand hectares.
4. A zone of weak damage, where individual anomalies in growth processes were noted. No visible damage was found in the pines. All trees retained normal growth and needle color. The absorbed dose was 50-120 rad, the exposure dose rate was 20 mR/hour.

More recently, they were built for visitors, so there are already places for hundreds of tourists to relax.

Which was the central object of the city of Pripyat. It had several sections, a hall where concerts were held and film screenings were held. Not long ago, a sign was lit on it.

A complex of buildings located on a large area. There were three buildings in the complex, the tallest was the administrative building, its height was eight floors.

The plant is a secret facility, what its employees were doing is still unknown.

for a day it costs from $79, but it is better to take a group tour, it will cost a couple of times cheaper, you can also rent a personal dosimeter for $10.

By paying for the tour, you can visit the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the “city that does not exist” and some villages, and if the tour is multi-day, then there are other sights.

Staying in the exclusion zone, the tourist will receive a dose of radiation comparable to an hour-long flight on an airplane.

However, a longer stay is contraindicated, the longer a person is in contact with the radiation background, the greater the effect on the body.

This zone attracts not only tourists who come here for short excursions, but also stalkers who spend a lot of time here and travel through abandoned cities and villages.
How stalkers spend their time in the exclusion zone, will tell the photo report with the story of one of the stalkers.
Under the waning moon, we walked through the thick summer air, filled with the aromas of field herbs. Walks easily in the cool of the night. Periodically, a variety of night creatures proboscis in the bushes strive.
After a short halt and replenishment of water supplies from the nearest swamp, we crossed the Uzh River ford.


After winding in the fields, we came to the ruins of the church and decided to spend the night in an abandoned village, the forces after the night fields were running out.


We found a well-preserved hut in the village and decided that it would shelter us. In the morning we laid out the luggage and began to have breakfast under a peacefully crackling dosimeter.




It was impossible to walk during daylight hours. We used the day to have a good rest and replenish our water supplies. We had plenty of walks through the beautiful nature and the abandoned village. There are ruins of an Orthodox church in the village, local priests look after it and put metal-plastic windows in the room with the altar (!), It looks wild in these parts.








The night was a long and difficult journey. We broke through the forests along the paths of wild animals, scratched under high-voltage lines, and by dawn we reached the outskirts of Pripyat.




Checkpoint of an abandoned city with traces of a stalker parking lot. The forest between the checkpoint and the Jupiter plant made a very depressing impression on me. The remains of radioactive equipment are scattered among the trees, which glow so much that even marauders did not cut them into metal.


We have breakfast on the roof with a view of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and go to bed. During the day it is not safe to walk, you can run into a police patrol.


In the morning and at night we saw another stalker group and later we met friends with whom we periodically crossed paths until the very exit from the zone. We met, drank moonshine with bacon and garlic in luxurious apartments and drove for a walk around the city at night.
Stained-glass window of the cafe "Pripyat" near the pond.


On the far bank of the pond there are huge 30-meter-high abandoned port cranes. Against the backdrop of the starry sky, they looked like Star Wars vehicles.









In the rays of dawn, we quietly made our way through some radioactive burial grounds to the oil depot in order to photograph the ISU-152 - a self-propelled artillery installation from the last world war, which rests behind the fence of the residential part of the oil depot. I can't confuse the smell of radioactive dumps with anything now.




126 medical unit in the basement of which is one of the dirtiest places in the zone. In a small room are the things of firefighters who received doses of radiation several times higher than the lethal ones and are still wildly glowing. More than once I thought about the dedication of people who raked up the consequences of a radioactive catastrophe. I watched a lot of old videos, and there people really realized what they were doing, that they were sacrificing themselves for the sake of others - this is very ... It is important when the conditions in which people grew up make them capable of such actions for the sake of others.







Abortion Journal. There was no sex in the Soviet Union, but there were abortions.


Shoes on the shelf in kindergarten. It's hard to imagine a darker place.


Traditional sunset on the roof of a 16-storey building with a hookah and our new friends. From here you have a beautiful view of the city.






View of the fifth microdistrict at night. The ghostly nine-story panel buildings, like the gnawed bones of an animal, reflect the pale moonlight.


One of the most powerful places is two chairs on the roof, which one of the stalkers took out there. We stuck there for many hours, smoked a hookah, looked at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, into the density of the starry sky and at the ghost town along the overgrown streets of which nocturnal animals roam.


Ferris wheel in an amusement park.


Ferris wheel in the center of Pripyat. Against the background of the starry sky, it can only be seen illegally.


We met dawn on the roof of a sixteen-story building with a coat of arms. I was very interested in the coat of arms, I have not seen anything like it anywhere else.


I fell asleep without waiting for dawn.


They say that sometimes these letters on the roof of the building are rearranged by stalkers and the local police organize a wild search of the whole city on this occasion.




Swimming pool of school number 3.


Some places in the city are specially furnished with very high quality for sightseeing photo work, like this room with gas masks.


A fresco at the post office, we went to take a couple of shots, we have a long road ahead through the night forests.




Having entered the dark strip after the red forest, somewhere very close we heard the many-voiced howl of a large pack of wolves. It was scary, because they howled right on the course, having collected a point in a fist and getting ready to break through, we moved forward. I kept firecrackers with me - in the hope that in an emergency, loud pops would scare away predators. Everything worked out and closer to the morning we came to a trolleybus abandoned by someone in the middle of the field. This is a popular stalker base, here we drank tea and had a snack. This place seemed to me somewhat similar to the bus from the movie "Into the Wild", where the main character spent his last days.




Stalker lodge. We caught up with our friends not far from Chernobyl-2.


A long and gloomy corridor between the antennas and the military camp.


Closer to sunset, we climbed the Duga-1 air defense radar, an abandoned huge antenna, towering 150 meters above the forests of the zone. Obiwan climbed onto the resonator. There was a wind, it shook and staggered, but he just gathered the eggs into a fist and walked along the pipe at a height of one hundred meters.


The higher we climbed, the stronger the wind became, and with it a special almost ultrasonic "Ring". The wind whistled through millions of steel cables and antenna resonators, singing a brain-burning song.


From the top, we watched the setting sun and watched the columns of smoke. Somewhere in the distance, a forest burned. The stalkers say that the current authorities are deliberately burning forests, pushing through some kind of bill to tear up the zone and shrink it from 30 to 10 kilometers next year.


Another creepy story. There is a room with dead wolves in the abandoned military town. It is not clear how they got there, but the walls of the room are scratched from the inside by paws and two mummies lie on the floor.


And then there was a long road home. The zone for me is an endless starry sky, open space.


Passing under the power line, we saw that a tree had fallen on the wires. It smoldered, pulled wires and could start a fire. Having entered the foresters' house, we drank tea and left them a note with the exact coordinates of the accident.