Sergi runs a business in Ukraine taking tourists to the abandoned Chernobyl site and the surrounding devastated landscape. You can visit it for $125, or $500 for a private tour. “We don’t call these tours, but visits to the exclusion zone,” he comments wryly, “the government started to allow them in 2000.”
The radiation levels in the worst-hit areas of the reactor building were estimated at 5.6 röntgen per second, equivalent to 20,000 röntgen per hour. A lethal dose is around 500 röntgen (5 Gy) over 5 hours. Plenty of emergency workers called to the site immediately after the accident in April 1986 received fatal doses within minutes of arriving.
The blast sent a cloud of radioactive smoke into the air that forced over 336,000 people to flee their homes, many of which are now in the deserted exclusion zone that Sergi’s team of four can take you to. “We started the project in 2000 as an incoming travel operator, to make money of course” he says as we ask how he became involved in the business. Sergi tells us that he takes between fifty and sixty groups a year varying in size from one to fifty people but usually between 4 and 12.
So how dangerous is nuclear tourism? “It’s safe during the tour but people are naturally very scared of the radiation.” And what’s the best bit? “Everybody is amazed by Ghost Town or Atomic City,” says Sergi, referring to Prypiat which was literally bathed in radioactive ash after the blast and has been uninhabited since. “In Prypiat we can enter some buildings still. But you can’t take any souvenirs,” he adds. Pilfering radioactive possessions hadn’t really crossed my mind.
Any amusing stories you can tell me? “They never detected any changes (mutations) in the wild life – but we definitely see changes in nature, especially in Prypiat – it looks like trees were kicked off their clocks – the spring comes much earlier there and the same happens with the fall.”
Sergi gets visitors from UK, Northern Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and most of them hear about his company online. Visit his website at www.tourkiev.com or you can email him if you’ve got any questions about visits to the exclusion zone. Sergi took all the photos in this article himself; see more here.
