We got up early and headed to a hotel to meet a group of fellow explorers keen to visit Pripyat. After struggling to find money and then struggling to find breakfast, it was good to get on a minibus and relax into the journey north to the Alienation Zone, otherwise known as the Area of Mandatory Relocation. Our guide was a student from the UK who was doing a PHD looking into tourism around Chernobyl. This was his 23rd visit to the location and he was heading back to the UK the next day. We were really lucky to have him on our tour as he knew loads about the disaster, and was able to answer loads of questions relating to it and provide lots of insight.
A three hour journey north saw us arrive at the first of three checkpoints that would be required to get to Pripyat. The checkpoints were not a cursory or superficial thing. The guards checked the passports of every visitor against the names that had been sent ahead. At each checkpoint our papers had to be in order to proceed further. This highlighted an interesting contradiction in the number of urbex explorers who appear to have visited Pripyat under their own steam as it were, vs the feasibility of actually doing this. The alienation zone is around 200,000 square kilometres, and after the first checkpoint, there is a 10km journey to the second, followed by an 18km journey to the third, so this really isn't a journey you can do on foot, and you really can't get a car in without going through a checkpoint, and you really can't go through a checkpoint without being on an official tour. If you see what I mean..... well actually you can, as we discovered.... but that's another story...
I forgot to mention that during our journey to the alienation zone, we had been shown a documentary on a TV in the minibus which was made about the Chernobyl disaster. It was a well made film and was absolutely fascinating .... and very sobering. Heres some potted facts and info - when the accident happened, the first people to arrive on the scene were fire fighters who thought it was just a regular fire and were wearing no protection. Two died that night from radiation. 24 died over the next couple of weeks. After 2 days of trying to decide what to do about the burning reactor, the Russian military called their best helicopter pilots back from the Afghan front and they flew sorties over the reactor with soldiers dropping sand bags one by one onto the fire. This was the extent of their plan to deal with the disaster - drop sand bags onto it. Needless to say countless numbers of soldiers who were flying over the fire and dropping sand bags died. 1/4 of all the pilots died within months.
190 tons of nuclear fuel was in reactor 4 when it exploded and the uranium fire it caused was so hot that it melted the sandbags ontop of it and then started to melt the concrete floor underneath it. Below the concrete that it was burning through was all the water that had collected from the initial attempts to put the fire out. Along with many other things that were hushed up at the time, was the fact that there was nearly a second and much more serious nuclear explosion which would have occurred had the nuclear fuel melted through the concrete and come into contact with the water. Calculations have shown that should this have happened the explosion would have been hundreds of thousands of times more radioactive than Hiroshima and Nagasaki and would have likely rendered most of Europe uninhabitable.
All of the Russian focus on containing the disaster centred on ensuring that the melted nuclear material didn't come into contact with the water below it. New sorties were flown over the reactor, this time dropping lead bars and lead shot. These quickly brought the temperature down but also resulted in vaporized and highly radioactive lead. At the same time, miners from all around Russia were drafted in to dig an underground tunnel to below the reactor where they would create a room which would be filled with a cooling system designed to stop the melted core from sinking further into the ground and coming into contact with water. This was achieved with the help of thousands of minors, many of whom died.
As well as containing the melted core, they needed to clean up the massive amounts of radioactive material that had fallen all around the reactor. Initially the military used remote control vehicles, but the radiation was so severe that it destroyed their electronics and control systems. Instead, biorobots were called in .... in other words humans. For many of the areas they were cleaning up, such as the roof of the reactor, 15-45 seconds of radiation was terminal. As such they were told to run and pick up two spadefulls of rubbish from the roof, throw it over the edge and then get out of there. These people would subsequently suffer a life of illness for about a minutes work. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were involved in this operation and in this way, two spadefulls at a time, they cleared up the disaster.
I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but all this information was really insightful when we came to actually visit the reactor and the town of Pripyat.
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