netbeast

There is a German girl on youtube, a physicist, who earns money by doing tours of the area, usually she does not even take money, but asks for you to buy her specific equipment and then takes samples etc.

The areas where you actually can go are far from dangerous, yes, they are not healthy, but for you to get cancer and/or radiation poisoning, you actually need to be near the unlucky reactor, in the basement of the hospital, where they stored all of the firemen clothes and shoes or pick up some of the graphite, that has been blown to smithereens when it blew. I saw a video where they found a piece the size of a grain of sand round 100km away on the side of a major highway by just digging around with a dosimeter.

Did you know that the rest of the reactors actually worked until 2001? that means that there were at least 2000 people daily in that area. The explosion happened in 1986, but they shut the whole complex down only 15 years later because of the electricity shortage in the country.

I would love to go there as well, because Pripyat itself is a pristine example of a well contained soviet city. there are a fair few around the baltics which were used as military cities, but they are all in a fairly bad state, pripyat, however, is still quite interesting.