VISIT SUNNY CHERNOBYL

Day Trips Through a Radioactive Wonderland

It began on a train. Vienna to Kiev, rocking back and forth in a cabin of the Kiev Express. There was a certain Agatha Christie‑meets‑Leonid Brezhnev charm to it. Long oriental rugs ran the length of its corridors, and the passenger compartments were outfitted with a faux wood‑grain veneer and dark red seats that folded up to form bunks.

It’s not actually called the Kiev Express. If it were an express, it wouldn’t take thirty‑six hours. In fact, train is no way to make this trip. I bought my ticket only because I believed, unaccountably, that Vienna and Kiev were close to each other. They are not.

I was going to Chernobyl, on vacation.

Trains are for reading, and I had brought a pair of books: Voices from Chernobyl, a collection of survivor interviews, and Wormwood Forest, an investigation of the accident’s effect on the environment. I recommend them both, although when I say that trains are for reading, I don’t mean that I was doing all that much. Really I was taking an epic series of naps, sporadically interrupted with books.

My companion in the passenger compartment was Max, a rotund, smiling man in his early thirties. Max spoke in a high, oddly formal voice and looked like a grown‑up Charlie Brown, if Charlie Brown had grown up in the USSR. Originally from Kiev, he now worked in Australia as a computer programmer. He had an endearing way of stating the obvious. I would wake up from a nap, my book sliding onto the floor, and look out the window to see that we had stopped in a station.

“We have stopped,” Max would say.

We spent the first night crossing the length of Slovakia. A beautiful dusk settled over the cracked smokestacks of deserted factories.

In the morning, we reached the Ukrainian border and rolled into a cluttered rail yard, coming to rest between a set of oversize jacks, taller than the train car itself. A team of crusty rail workers set themselves wrenching and hammering at the wheels of the train, and soon the jacks were raising the entire car into the air, leaving the wheel trucks beneath us on the rails.

The train tracks in the former Soviet Union don’t match those in Europe, you see. So they were changing the wheels on the train.

“They are changing the wheels on the train,” Max said.

By afternoon we had entered the flowered alpine landscape of the Carpathian Mountains, and Max had become curious about my plans. I chose not to tell him that I was embarking on an epic, years‑long quest to visit the world’s most polluted places. I just said I was headed for Chernobyl.

His face lit up. He had stories to tell. In the spring of 1986, when word of the disaster got out, he was eleven years old, living in Kiev. Soon, people were trying to get their children out of the city. It was nearly impossible to get train tickets, Max said, but somehow his family got him onto a train bound southeast for the Crimea. Even though tickets were so hard to come by, the train was nearly empty, and Max implied that the government had manufactured the ticket shortage to keep people from leaving the city.

“When we arrived,” he said, “the train was surrounded by soldiers. They tested everyone and their things for radiation before allowing them to move on. They were trying to keep people from spreading contamination.”

He stayed away from Kiev that entire summer. From his parents, he heard stories about life in the city during those months. The streets were washed down every day. Bakeries that had once left their wares out in the open on shelves now wrapped them in plastic.

Max talked about the possibility that cancer rates in the area had increased because of Chernobyl, and he told me that his wife, also from Kiev, had abnormalities in her thyroid, which he attributed to radioactive exposure.

“It’s very lucky Kiev didn’t get more radiation, thanks to the winds,” he said. Then, in his very polite, clipped voice, he asked, “And what do you think about nuclear energy?”

That night I lay restless in my bunk and imagined–as only an American can–the post‑Soviet gloom slipping by outside, felt the train shudder as it pushed through the thick ether left behind by an empire. In the book of Chernobyl survivors’ stories, I read an account by a firefighter’s widow. They were newly married when her husband responded to the fire at the reactor. One of the first at the scene, he received catastrophic doses of radiation and died after two weeks of gruesome illness.

Desperately in love, his wife had snuck into the hospital to accompany him in his ordeal, even though his very body was dangerously radioactive.

“I don’t know what I should talk about,” she says in her account. “About death or about love? Or are they the same?”

Kiev is a beautiful city, a true Paris of the East, a charming metropolis whose forests of horse chestnut trees set off its ancient churches and classic apartment buildings like jewels on a bed of crumpled green velvet. The trick is to come in the summertime, when a warm breeze blows across the Dnieper River and the bars and cafés spill out into the gentle evening. You can stroll down the Andriyivskyy Descent, lined with cafés and shops, or explore the mysterious catacombs of the Pechersk Lavra, with its menagerie of dead monks. Or you can dive into the city’s pulsing downtown nightlife.

I went straight for the Chernobyl Museum.

There’s a special blend of horror and civic pride on display at any museum dedicated to a local industrial disaster, and the Chernobyl Museum is surely the best of its kind. The place incorporates history, memorial, commentary, art, religion, and even fashion under a curatorial ethos that is the mutant offspring of several different aesthetics.

In one of the museum’s two main halls, I found a bizarre temple‑like space. Soothing Russian choral music emanated from the walls. In the center of the room lay a full‑size replica of the top face of the infamous reactor. A dugout canoe was suspended above it, heaped with a bewildering mixture of religious images and children’s stuffed toys. I tried to understand the room’s message, and could not. Empty contamination suits lingered in the shadows, arranged in postures of bafflement and ennui.

The second hall housed a definitive collection of Chernobyl memorabilia, as well as a tall aluminum scaffold hung with mannequins wearing nuclear cleanup gear. They seemed to be flying in formation, a squad of unusual superheroes. Their leader, arms upraised, wore a black firefighting suit with large white stripes and a metal backpack connected to a gas mask. Through the bubble of the helmet’s face guard, I could just make out the cool, retail gaze of a female head, with full eyelashes and painted plastic lips.

Underneath, there was a cross‑sectioned model of the reactor building in its pre‑accident state. As I peered into it to get a view of the reactor’s inner workings, two docents lurking by the door noticed my interest. Moving with the curt authority of guards, they rushed forward to turn the model on, groping at a control panel attached to the base. The model reactor glowed warmly, showing the normal circulation of water in the core. But the women were unsatisfied. Fussing in Ukrainian, they began flipping the switch back and forth, wiggling and slapping the little control panel with increasing fervor. Finally, they jiggled the switch just right, and the rest of the reactor’s systems–water and steam pipes, cooling systems and boilers–flickered to life.

To understand the Chernobyl accident, it helps to know something about how electricity gets generated and, specifically, about nuclear power–though not so much that your eyes glaze over.

In general, power plants generate electricity by spinning turbines. Picture a big hamster wheel and you get the idea. Each turbine is connected to a generator, in which a conductor turns through the field of a strong magnet, thus creating electricity by magic. Men in hard hats then distribute this power to entire continents full of televisions and toaster ovens.

The ageless question, then, is just how to spin all those damn turbines. You can build a dam to collect huge volumes of water that you can let rush through your turbines. You can build windmills with little generators that get powered by the turning rotors. Or you can boil a lot of water and force the steam into the turbine under high pressure.

This last one works great, but you need a hell of a lot of heat to make enough steam. Where are you going to get it? Well, you can burn coal, natural gas, or even trash, if you like. That, or you can cook up some nuclear fission.

Oh, fission. People make it sound so complicated, but any chump can get the basics. It involves–to skip most of the physics–piling up a giant stack of purified uranium to make your reactor’s core. You’ll have to mix some graphite in with the uranium, to mellow out the neutrons it’s emitting.

We good? Okay. Once you’ve got the core together, install some plumbing in it so you can run water through to carry off the heat, and then just stand back and cross your fingers.

A few of the uranium atoms in your core will spontaneously split–they’re funny that way–and when they do, they’ll give off heat and some neutrons. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what neutrons are, other than that they’re tiny and will shoot off like bullets, colliding with neighboring uranium atoms and causing them to split. This will give off more heat and more neutrons, which will cause still further atoms to split, and so on, and so on, and so on. The immense heat created by this chain reaction will heat the water, which will create the steam, which will spin the turbines at terrifying speed, which will turn the generators, which will create an ungodly amount of electricity, which will be used to keep office buildings uncomfortably cold in the middle of summer.

So far, so good.

The problem with this chain reaction is that, by its very nature, it tends to run out of control. So to keep your reactor’s apocalyptic side in check, you should slide some rods made of boron or hafnium into the reactor core. (Remember to make room for them while you’re stacking the uranium.) These rods–let’s call them control rods –will be like sponges, absorbing all those lively, bullet‑like neutrons. With the control rods duly inserted, you’ll get…nothing.

The trick, then, is to find the happy medium, while remaining on the correct side of the line that separates air‑conditioning from catastrophe. To do this, you’ll need to pull the control rods out of the core far enough to let the chain reaction begin, but not so far that it runs out of control. Then you can heat water and spin turbines and generate electricity to your heart’s content.

But pull the control rods out slowly, okay? And for the love of God, please–please –put them back when you’re done.

With the Chernobyl Museum taken care of, I had a couple of days to kill in Kiev before my excursion to Chernobyl itself, and I spent them exploring my new neighborhood. I was living in style, sidestepping Kiev’s overpriced hotels by renting an inexpensive apartment that was nevertheless nicer than any I had ever lived in back home. The front door of my building opened onto the bustling but cozy street of Zhitomirskaya, and it was an easy walk to Saint Sophia Square. There was also a nice terrace park where the young and hip of Kiev would gather in the late afternoon to throw Frisbees, play bongo drums, and drink beer in the glow of the sunset.

It all filled me with a churning panic. I just don’t like being a clueless foreigner in a strange city where I’ve got no friends. I was also having trouble finding a portable radiation detector for my trip to the Exclusion Zone around Chernobyl. The detector would come in handy for measuring my radioactive exposure, with great precision, in units I wouldn’t understand. But Amazon didn’t deliver overnight to Kiev, and so I was out of ideas. It was time to be resourceful–I had to get someone else to figure it out.

If journalism can teach us anything, it’s that local people are a powerful tool to save us from our own fecklessness and incompetence. We call them fixers. In my case, I hired a capable young journalism school graduate called Olena. Skeptical at first, she soon realized that I was less interested in a simple rehash of the local disaster story than in exploring new touristic horizons, and she warmed to the concept. Olena set to work finding the radiation detector, calling one Chernobyl‑related bureaucracy after another. To our surprise, nobody had any ideas. Even the government’s Chernobyl ministry, Chernobylinterinform, was clueless. Measuring radiation didn’t seem to be much of a priority among the citizens of Kiev. Maybe they just didn’t want to think about what lay a short way upriver.

It’s possible there is wisdom in such willful ignorance. The subject of radiation, after all, is so mysterious, and its units and measurement so confusing, that carrying around a little beeping gadget may not, in the end, leave you any better informed about your safety.

But every visitor to Chernobyl should have a working understanding of radiation and how it’s measured. So let’s review the basics. You can skip this section if you want, but you’ll miss the part where I tell you the one weird old tip for repelling gamma rays.

Radiation, as far as tourists need be concerned, comes in three flavors: alpha, beta, and gamma. One source of radiation is unstable atoms–those same atoms that are so useful in building a nuclear core. In contrast to lighter, trustier elements like iron or helium, uncomfortably obese elements like uranium and plutonium are always looking for excuses to shed bits of themselves. That is to say, they are radioactive. These unstable elements will occasionally fart out things we call alpha or beta particles or gamma rays–the latter being the nasty stuff. This process–called decay –leaves the atom a bit smaller and sometimes with a different name, as it is alchemically transformed from one radioactive element into another.

Once in a while, an atom will suffer a complete breakdown and split in half. That’s fission. After the split, particles and gamma rays spew off in all directions, and two atoms of a lighter element are left behind.

But we’ll get to that. The point is, between decay and fission and other sources, there’s radiation zipping around and through us all the time. There’s the natural decay of Earth’s atoms, and there are cosmic rays shooting down at us from outer space (you get a higher dose when you’re up in an airplane), and then there’s the X‑ray your dentist gave you, and so on. You’re getting irradiated all the time. But don’t freak out yet. Although radiation can burn your skin, give you cancer, and disrupt the functioning of your very cells, it takes a lot of it.

And that’s the problem. How much counts as a lot? It’s hard even to predict how badly you’ll get sunburned on a day trip to the beach, and that’s with plain old solar radiation. In the nuclear case, your only hope of a clue is to have a radiation detector on hand.

Even with a detector, you’re likely to remain confused by the bewildering array of terms and units with which radiation and radioactive dosage are measured. There are rads and rems, sieverts and grays, roentgens, curies and becquerels, around which buzz a swarm of attending coulombs, ergs, and joules. You might want to know the disintegration rate of a radioactive material, or its potential to ionize the air around it, or the amount of energy it can impart to solid matter, or the amount of energy it actually does impart to the living tissue of hapless organisms–such as Chernobyl tourists–and on and on.

And then it all depends on how quickly you get your dose. In this, radiation is analogous to certain other poisons, such as alcohol. A single shot of bourbon every weekend for a year is hardly dangerous. But fifty shots on a single night will kill you.

Finally, it matters which part of your body gets irradiated. Limb? Count yourself lucky. Guts? Not so much.

So it’s no wonder that radiation is so mysterious and frightening, and that it features in the backstories of so many comic book monsters. It’s invisible, deadly, cosmic, extremely confusing, and rides shotgun with the nuclear apocalypse. The stuff is just spooky, and if–like me–you’re never going to have an intuitive understanding of its dosage and true risks, you might as well ease off on worrying about it so much. The purpose of the detector, then, is not to better understand the danger in your environment, but to gather up your anxiety and bundle it into a single number on a small digital readout, so you can carry your fear more efficiently.

Oh–and the tip for repelling gamma rays is that you can’t.

Olena had a plan. “Let’s go to Karavayevi Dachi,” she said. “Electronics black market.”

What Manhattan’s Chinatown is to food, Kiev’s Karavayevi Dachi is to electronics. It was early afternoon when we arrived. Metal stalls lined its alleys, roller‑fronts thrown up to reveal jumbles of electronic components and devices. Men with rough, sun‑cured faces sat at wooden folding tables strewn with vacuum tubes, transformers, electrical plugs, computer chips, adapters. The husks of car stereos hung in bunches, banana‑like. It seemed doubtful that we would find a working radiation detector here among the tangled heaps of wires and transistors, and as we went from stall to stall, the conversations followed a pattern that always ended in “nyet.”

One man claimed to have a detector at home that he would sell us for only 150 hryvnia–about thirty bucks. The catch was that it could only detect beta radiation. Forget it, dude. Any simpleton knows that beta particles–which can be blocked by regular clothes–are nowhere near as scary or stylish as gamma rays. We walked off to another part of the market, the annoyed vendor calling after us in protest, “But beta is the best!”

Another man had been eavesdropping and now approached us. He knew of a better place to find radiation detectors, he said, just a five‑minute walk up the street. He would be happy to take us there. We left Karavayevi Dachi behind and made our way up a tree‑lined street of brick apartment blocks.

Our guide’s name was Volod. A middle‑aged man with receding hair brushed straight back, he wore a beige coat over a striped beige shirt and beige jeans, and didn’t seem to have much more of an idea than I did of where we were going. Our five‑minute walk grew to fifteen and then twenty minutes, and I became progressively less convinced that we were detector‑bound.

Striking up a conversation, we soon learned that Volod had been a communications officer in the Soviet army during the 1980s and had worked in the Exclusion Zone for two weeks, starting a month after the accident.

I asked him if he had received a liquidator’s certificate. The “liquidators,” in the creepy argot of the accident, were the thousands of workers, mostly soldiers, who had spent months razing villages to the ground and covering them with fresh earth, washing off roads, even chopping down and burying entire contaminated forests. The destroyed reactor had coated the landscape with radioactive dust and peppered it with actual chunks of nuclear fuel hurled clear by the explosion. It had been critical not to leave all that waste out in the open, where it could be tracked out of the zone or blown into the air by the wind. The liquidators’ job was to clean it all up.

Many liquidators received high doses of radiation, and in consideration for their work, they were given special ID certificates that confirmed their status as veterans of the disaster cleanup. They were entitled to certain benefits, including special healthcare and preferential treatment in the housing system, but these benefits varied depending on each liquidator’s dosage, on how soon after the accident he’d gotten there, and on how long he’d worked in the zone. A new mess was created–this time governmental. The system was riddled with loopholes, inconsistent in awarding benefits, and extravagant in its opportunities for corruption.

Volod told us he had not received a certificate. He hadn’t been in the zone long enough, or early enough, he said. He didn’t want to talk about it.

We were a good half hour from Karavayevi Dachi when he cried out. He had spotted the fabled detector store at last, among a small row of shops on the ground floor of an office building. We entered at a triumphant stride.

With its zealous air‑conditioning and spotless tile floors, the store was a step up from the grungy maze of Karavayevi Dachi. Its offerings, though, were even more varied. Scanning the room, I saw shelves of videophones and security cameras next to displays of construction paper, coloring books, and crayons. Behind us, an entire section was given over to a plastic oasis of elaborate garden fountains cast in the shape of tree stumps. Between this and the Chernobyl Museum, I was beginning to discern a Ukrainian national genius for eclecticism.

And they sold radiation detectors. PADEKC, said the brand name on the box. NHDNKATOP PADNOAKTNBHOCTN. The device itself was a small, white plastic box with a digital readout and three round buttons. It looked like an early‑model iPod, if iPods had been built by PADEKC. It was simple and stylish, perfect for hip, young professionals on the go in a nuclear disaster zone. Leonid–the salesman–assured me that it could measure not only gamma radiation but alpha and beta as well. (Leonid was a liar.)

He turned it on. “Russian made,” he said. We crowded around. The unit beeped uncertainly a few times, then popped up a reading of 16. Sounded good to me. I coughed up far too many hryvnia and tossed the PADEKC in my backpack, and we went outside.

In front of the store, Volod asked for some money. I had been dreading his price.

“You should pay me vodka money,” he said without irony. “A good bottle will cost about twelve hryvnia.” He considered a dollar’s worth of vodka decent pay for an hour’s work. I handed him twenty hryvnia. As he started for the street, I asked him if he would tell us more about his time in Chernobyl.

He stopped and turned to us, suddenly taller.

“As a former Soviet officer, I cannot,” he said. And then he wandered off to buy his vodka.

The problem with Reactor No. 4 was not so much that its safety systems failed–although you could say they did–but that some of those systems had been disabled. Now, you could also argue that when you’re running a thousand‑megawatt nuclear reactor, you should never, ever disable any of its safeguards, but then…well, there’s no but. You’d be right.

Those systems were disabled by an overzealous bunch of engineers who were eager to run some tests on the power plant and thought that they could do so without a safety net. On the evening of April 25, 1986, they began an experiment to see if the reactor’s own electrical needs could be supplied by a freewheeling turbine in the event of a power outage. This is a little bit like stalling your car on the highway and trying to use its coasting momentum to run the AC. But in this case, it involved a three‑stories‑tall pile of nuclear fuel.

Over the course of several hours, the reactor failed to run hot enough for the experiment to proceed, so more and more control rods were pulled out of the core to juice the chain reaction up to a suitable level. Meanwhile, the flow of water through the core had dropped below normal levels, allowing more and more heat and steam to build up inside the reactor, a condition that made it dangerously volatile. The built‑in systems to prevent all this from taking place were among the safeguards that had been shut off so the test could proceed.

In the wee hours of April 26, the operators noticed a spike in the heat and power coming from the reactor and realized that, if the control rods weren’t reinserted immediately, the reactor would run out of control. It is assumed that they pushed the panic button to drop the control rods back into the core and stop the chain reaction–but panic was not enough. Not only were the rods too slow in sinking down into the reactor, but as they did so, they also displaced even more water, actually increasing the rate of reaction for a moment. The horrified engineers were powerless to stop it.

Within seconds, the power level in the core outstripped its normal operational level by a hundredfold. The water in the core exploded into superheated steam, blowing the two‑thousand‑ton reactor shield off the core. Moments later another explosion–possibly of steam, possibly of hydrogen, possibly an event called a nuclear excursion –punched a gaping hole in the top of the building. Bits of nuclear fuel rained down on the reactor complex and nearby landscape, setting the building and its surroundings on fire.

Inside the core, unknown to the panicking staff, the superheated blocks of graphite that formed the matrix of the reactor had also burst into flame, and the remaining nuclear fuel, completely uncontrolled, was melting into a radioactive lava that would burrow its way into the basement. All the while, radioactive smoke, dust, and steam spewed into the sky, a giant nuclear geyser that continued to erupt for days on end.

Before long, radiation sensors in Sweden were picking up the downwind contamination, and American spy satellites were focusing on the belching ruin of the reactor building, and the whole world was wondering exactly what the hell had happened in Chernobyl. In some ways, we still don’t know.

My pants made nylon swooshing sounds as I descended the musty stairwell of my apartment building. I had bought a tracksuit for my weekend trip to Chernobyl, which made me look like a Ukrainian jackass circa 1990, but it was disposable in case of contamination.

By chance, I was staying right across the street from the Chernobylinterinform, from which my trip to the zone would depart. This was in the time before Chernobyl tourism became officially sanctioned. In 2011, the policy was changed so that any yahoo could sign up for a tour through a travel agent–whereas in my day, that yahoo had to…sign up for a tour through a travel agent. I really don’t know the difference, except that now the tours are officially offered to the public as tourism. Like most destinations after the word gets out, the place is probably ruined by now.

It was a beautiful day for a road trip, cloudless and faintly breezy. Nikolai, a lanky young driver for the Chernobyl authority, found a radio station playing insistent techno that suited his cheerful urgency with the accelerator, and we made our way out through the busy streets of northern Kiev. (Radiation level at the gas station: 20 microroentgens.) We followed the Dnieper River north, until it wandered out of sight to the east. The road coasted through undulating farmland, bordered in stretches by lines of shady trees screening out the rising heat of the day. In our little blue station wagon, we plunged through villages, tearing past a boy idling on his bicycle, an old lady waddling along the road, a horse‑drawn cart loaded with hay.

Soon there were no more villages, only countryside and thickening pine forests dotted with fire‑warning signs. Compared with forest fires in the United States, which are disastrous mostly for their potential to destroy people’s houses, a forest fire in the Chernobyl area carries added detriments. Trees and vegetation have incorporated the radionuclides into their structure, mistaking them for naturally occurring nutrients in the soil (one reason to shy away from produce grown near the zone). A forest fire here has the potential to release those captured radioactive particles back into the air and become a kind of nuclear event all its own. It’s just one way in which the accident at Chernobyl has never really ended.

Less than two hours out from Kiev, we arrived at a checkpoint. A candy‑striped bar blocked the road between two guardhouses. There were signs with a lot of exclamation points and radioactivity symbols. Nikolai and I stepped out of the car and I gave my passport to the approaching guard. He wore a blue‑gray camouflage uniform, a cap bearing the Ukrainian trident, and a little film badge dosimeter on his chest, to measure his cumulative exposure while in the area. I should have asked him where I could get one of those.

After a cursory search, we hopped back into the car. The barricade rose, Nikolai gunned the engine, and we left the checkpoint, traveling onward through the forest, down the middle of a sun‑dappled road that no longer had a center line.

We had entered the Exclusion Zone.

At the Chernobylinterinform administrative building, in the town of Chernobyl–nearly ten miles distant from the reactor itself–we met Dennis, my escort. Standing at the top of the steps to the low, yellow building, Dennis matched the quasi‑military vibe of the zone. He was in his mid‑twenties, with an early baldness made irrelevant by a crew cut, and wore combat boots and a camouflage jacket and pants. The look was completed–and the martial spell broken–by a black sleeveless T‑shirt printed with the image of a football helmet, around which swirled a cloud of English words. A pair of wraparound sunglasses hid his eyes.

“First is the briefing,” he said coolly. “This is upstairs.” And with that he walked back into the building.

The briefing room was a long, airy space, its walls hung with photographs and maps. A wooden table surrounded by a dozen chairs dominated the center of the room. The floor was covered with an undulating adhesive liner printed to look like wood paneling. Must make for easy cleanup, I thought, in case anyone tracks in a little cesium.

Dennis and I were alone. The summer season hadn’t picked up yet. He retrieved a gigantic wooden pointer from the corner, and we approached a large topographic map on the front wall. He began diagramming our itinerary using his tree limb of a pointer, though the map was mere inches in front of us.

“We are here. Chernobyl,” he said, and tapped on the map. “We will drive to Kolachi. Buried village.” He tapped again. “Then to Red Forest. This is most radioactive point today.” He looked at me for emphasis. He was still wearing his sunglasses.

Turning back to the map, he continued. “From here we will go to Pripyat. This is deserted city. Then we can approach reactor to one hundred and fifty meters.”

It was the standard itinerary, allowing visitors to inhabit their preconceptions of Chernobyl as a scene of disaster and fear–but without actually straying off the beaten path or risking contamination. This was, after all, what most people wanted. But I hadn’t come all this way only to wallow in post‑nuclear paranoia. I was here to enjoy the place, and this was the moment to make it happen.

“Is there any way…” How to put it? “Is there any way we could go canoeing?”

Dennis regarded me blankly from behind his shades. In their silvery lenses, I could see the reflection of someone who looked like me, with an expression on his face that said, Yes. I am an idiot.

“This is not possible,” said Dennis.

“Well, if there’s any way to get on the water, or maybe visit the local fishing hole, I’m happy to sacrifice part of our planned itinerary.”

The conference room was quiet. The shadow of a grimace passed across Dennis’s face. “This is. Not possible,” he said, without emotion. He was proving witheringly immune to what I had hoped would be my contagious enthusiasm. But it’s at moments like this, when you’re trying to take your vacation in a militarily controlled nuclear disaster zone–for which, I might add, there is no proper guidebook–that you must be more than normally willing to expose yourself as a fool in the service of your goals. I laid my cards on the table.

“Look. Let’s say I wanted to go for a boat ride with some friends somewhere in the zone,” I said. “Just theoretically speaking, where would we go? I mean, where are the really nice spots?”

A faint crease had developed in the dome of Dennis’s head.

I pressed on, telling him that I was trying to approach this not so much as a journalist or a researcher, but as a tourist. As a visitor. Where, for instance, could I find a good picnic spot in the Exclusion Zone? Where did he himself go on a slow day? And if it wasn’t possible in the zone, what would be the next best thing? I pointed to Strakholissya, just outside the zone, a town that I had identified while poring over a map the night before. What about that?

“Yes, this is nice place,” said Dennis. “You can go fishing here.”

I was making progress. Fishing?

“Yes,” said Dennis, gaining speed, “but this place is better.” He pointed to Teremtsi, a tiny spot nestled among a bunch of river islands deep inside the zone. “This is a good place for fishing,” he said. “I went once. Mostly I go there to collect mushrooms.”

I stared. Mushrooms, because they collect and concentrate the radionuclides in the soil, are supposed to be the last thing you should eat in the affected area. And Dennis gathered them in the heart of the Exclusion Zone.

“You collect mushrooms? And you eat them?” There was awe in my voice.

“Yes, this is clean area, I know. This is no problem.”

I couldn’t believe my luck. A total newbie, I was already teamed up with a guy who used the zone as his own mushroom patch and trout stream. I wanted to abandon our itinerary. Who needs to see a destroyed nuclear reactor when you can go fishing just downriver?

Don’t think I didn’t beg. But Dennis was far too professional to chuck the official program–with all its approved paperwork, stamped and signed in duplicate for each checkpoint–just because some half‑witted foreigner said pretty please. But this time, there was a moment’s hesitation. “This is, um. Not possible,” he said, getting back on script. But I saw the hint of a smile on his face as he turned away from the map.

The briefing continued down the side wall of the room, from one diagram to the next. There were a pair of maps showing the distribution of contamination by radioactive isotopes of cesium and strontium in the zone. The contamination is wildly uneven, depending on where the radioactive debris fell immediately after the explosion, and on the wind and rain in the days and weeks that followed, when the open reactor core was spewing a steady stream of radioactive smoke and particles into the air. The weather of those following weeks is inscribed on the ground, in contamination. The maps showed the distribution, color‑coded in shades of red and brown, a misshapen starfish with its heart anchored over the reactor.

The radiation level at any given spot also varies over time, although based on what, I’m not quite sure. So there are limits set for what is considered normal, just as there are in any city. Dennis told me that the standard in the town of Chernobyl was 80 microroentgens per hour. In Kiev, it was 50. (It’s about the same in New York, where background radiation alone gets you about 40 micros per hour.)

“In the last month, I measured 75 micros at different places in the town,” he said. Chernobyl was pushing the limit. But I was unclear what the standards for radiation levels really meant. In Kiev, for example, what difference did it make that the standard was 50 micros instead of 80, or 100?

“It means,” said Dennis, “there would be panic in Kiev if the reading was 51.” He thought people in Kiev were a little paranoid about contamination. “Just yesterday, some journalists called, saying they had heard there was a release of radioactive dust at the reactor,” he said. “I told them I had just been down to the reactor, and there was no problem.”

We had come to the end of the briefing. Dennis paused in front of the last photograph, which showed a large outdoor sculpture. Two angular gray columns held a slender crucifix aloft, like a pair of gigantic tweezers holding a diamond up for inspection. Below them, half a dozen life‑size figures lugged fire hoses and Geiger counters toward a replica of the reactor’s cooling tower.

It was the firemen’s memorial. In the hours immediately following the explosion, the firemen of Pripyat had responded to the fire that still burned in the reactor building, and had kept it from spreading to the adjacent reactor. Unaware at first that the core had even been breached, they received appalling doses of radiation and began dying within days.

Dennis turned to me, expressionless behind his shades. The giant pointer tapped gently on the photo of the memorial. “If not for those firemen,” he said, “we would have an eight‑hundred‑kilometer zone, instead of thirty.”

Nikolai was waiting in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette. “We work until five o’clock,” Dennis said. “So we’ll have lunch at half past four. Then at ten to five is football. It is the most important game.” He was talking about the World Cup. Ukraine’s soccer team had qualified for the first time, and tonight was the critical elimination match against Tunisia. Fanciful images of a raucous Chernobyl sports bar danced through my mind. I told Dennis it sounded like a great plan.

He rode shotgun, while I sat in back. A few hundred yards beyond the firemen’s memorial, Nikolai pulled into a small gravel parking lot and jumped out of the car to buy a bottle of beer and an ice cream bar. There was a convenience store in the zone.

Within a few minutes we reached the checkpoint for the ten‑kilometer limit, which encompasses the most‑contaminated areas. The car barely stopped as Dennis handed a sheet of paperwork through the window to the waiting guard. He folded the rest of our permission slips and tucked them into the car’s sun visor for later.

The air that streamed through the car’s open windows was warm and sweet, a valentine from the verdant countryside that surrounded us. It felt as though we were just three guys out for a pleasant drive in the country–which was more or less the truth. Dennis and Nikolai traded jokes and gossip in Russkrainian. “We’re talking about the other guide,” said Dennis. “He’s on vacation.” It seemed there were no more than a handful of Chernobylinterinform guides. It only added to the sense that I had found a traveler’s dream: an entire region that–although badly contaminated–was beautiful, interesting, and as yet unmolested by hordes of other visitors.

My thoughts were interrupted by a loud electronic beep. My radiation detector had turned itself on–funny, that–and now that there was actually some radiation to detect (a still‑modest 30 micros), it had begun to speak out with an annoying, electric bleat that in no way matched the PADEKC’s smooth iPod‑from‑Moscow look. There was a reason, I now realized, that this detector looked like something you might take to the gym instead of to a nuclear accident site: It was designed for the anxious pockets of people who thought 30 micros were worth worrying about.

In the front seat, Dennis had produced his own detector, a brick‑size box of tan plastic fronted by a metal faceplate. Little black switches and cryptic symbols in Cyrillic and Greek adorned its surface. I was jealous. It seemed there was no kind of radiation it couldn’t detect, and it probably got shortwave radio, too. Its design was the height of gamma chic: slightly clunky, industrially built, understatedly cryptic, and pleasingly retro. What really sold me was its beep. Unlike the fretful blurts of the PADEKC, the beeps of this pro model were restrained, almost musical. It sounded like a cricket, vigilantly noting for the record that you were currently under the bombardment of this many beta particles, or that many gamma rays. It was a detector made for someone who accepts some radiation as a fact of daily life, and who doesn’t want to lose focus by being reminded of it too loudly. Someone who is perhaps even something of a connoisseur of radiation levels. Someone like Dennis.

The car stopped. Dennis pointed out the window to a large mound among the trees. “This is Kolachi,” he said. A pair of metal warning signs stood crookedly in the tall grass. That was all that remained. The village had been so contaminated by the accident that it was not only evacuated but also leveled and buried. There were many such villages. Dennis held his meter out the window: 56 micros. It was my first time above Kiev‑panic levels.

Leaving Kolachi behind us, we passed by some old high‑tension electrical wires–presumably part of the system that had, until recently, carried electricity from the undamaged reactors of the Chernobyl complex, which had continued to function even after the accident. The Soviet and then Ukrainian governments kept the other three reactors running into the 1990s, and only shut the last one down in 2000. Of the thousands of people still reporting to work in the Exclusion Zone, the great majority are employed in the decommissioning of those reactors.

On the seat beside me, the PADEKC was getting insistent. I apologized for the racket, feeling the same embarrassment as when your cellphone rings in a quiet theater. I tried to put the damn thing on vibrate, but all I could manage was to get lost in its impenetrable Russian menus. When we took the turnoff for Pripyat, it began to freak out in earnest. The reading ascended quickly from 50 micros through the 60s and the 80s, and into the low 100s. The beeping increased in pace, in a way I could only find vaguely alarming. Nikolai glanced back at me, unconcerned, but wondering what my little meter was making such a fuss about.

We were crossing through the Red Forest. Named for the color its trees had turned when they were killed off by a particularly bad dose of contamination, the Red Forest was cut down and buried in place, becoming what must be the world’s largest radioactive compost heap. Back in the briefing room, Dennis had warned me that we would experience our highest exposure while passing through this area, which had since been replanted with a grove of pine trees, themselves stunted by the radiation.

As we rounded a bend, Dennis again held his meter aloft outside the passenger window. It began chirping merrily. Meanwhile the PADEKC was going nuts. In Kiev, Leonid had told me the upper limit on the unit was 300 microroentgens, but it now spiked from the mid‑100s directly to 361. The car filled with our detectors’ escalating beeps, which quickly coalesced into a single shrill tone that was painfully reminiscent of the flatlining heart monitor you hear on hospital TV shows.

Dennis’s meter topped out at 1,300 micros, about thirty times the background radiation in New York City. He twisted around in his seat to face me. “Yesterday it was up to 2,000,” he said. There was a hint of apology in his voice. Perhaps he was worried I might feel shortchanged for having received less than the maximum possible exposure from a Red Forest drive‑by, as if I had come to Nepal to see Mount Everest, only to find it obscured by clouds.

Over a bridge lined with rusted street lamps and ruined guardrails, Nikolai slowed the car to weave between the potholes dotting the roadway. At the bottom of the bridge’s far slope, we reached another checkpoint. Dennis adroitly snatched the next leaf of paperwork out of the stack and tucked it into the waiting hand of the guard. The sign at the checkpoint read PRIPYAT.

Even more than the reactor itself, Pripyat is the centerpiece of any day trip to the Exclusion Zone. Before 1986, it was a city of nearly fifty thousand people, devoted almost entirely to running the four nuclear reactors that sat just down the road and to building the additional reactors that were to be added to the complex. At the time of the meltdown, Reactors Nos. 5 and 6 were nearing completion, and a further six reactors were planned, making the neighborhood a one‑stop shop for the area’s nuclear energy needs.

It didn’t take long for the residents of Pripyat to realize there had been an accident. Anyone looking south from the upper stories of Pripyat’s tall apartment buildings could have seen smoke belching from the maw of the destroyed reactor building some two kilometers distant. What they didn’t know was that it was no ordinary fire.

The city was bathed in radiation, but the residents remained uninformed. They continued about their business for more than a day, while the government scrambled to contain the accident. Finally, at noon on April 27, nearly a day and a half after the explosion, the authorities announced their decision to evacuate the city.

You can say what you like about the Soviet government, which killed and exiled millions of its own people and repressed most of the rest. But you have to concede that when they put their minds to it, they really knew how to get a place evacuated. When at last the order was given, it took only hours for this city of fifty thousand people to become a ghost town. The evacuation was broadened over the following days to include more than a hundred thousand people. Ultimately, more than three hundred thousand were displaced.

Pripyat sat empty. In the months and years following the evacuation, it was looted and vandalized by people who were obviously unconcerned by the radioactive nature of their spoils, whether televisions for their own use or metal items to be sold as scrap. The evacuation and the looting turned Pripyat into what it is today: the world’s most genuinely post‑apocalyptic city.

In spite of what you might have seen in the movies, though, things can actually be pretty nice after an apocalypse–if a bit scarce in terms of human beings. The road that led us into Pripyat from the south was lined with bushes speckled with small white blossoms, the air thick with the smell of flowers. The vista opened up as we reached the center of town, allowing a view of the buildings around us. Dennis and I clambered out in the middle of an intersection, and Nikolai motored off down a side road to find a nice spot to sit and drink the beer he’d bought earlier.

The day was hot and sunny. The ghostly city surrounded us, the buildings of downtown looming up from behind scattered poplar trees. Behind us rose a ten‑story apartment block. Its pink and white plaster facade was falling off in patches, revealing the rough brickwork of the walls underneath. More apartment blocks stood along the road to the left, some of them crowned with large, Soviet hammer‑and‑sickle insignia that must once have lit up at night.

We walked toward the town plaza, following a path that had once been a sidewalk but was now a buckling concrete track invaded by weeds and grass. Dennis lit a cigarette and looked up as he took a long drag. A gentle breeze pushed a herd of little clouds across the sky. Birds flitted by.

The plaza was bordered on three sides by large buildings. To the right, a defunct neon sign announced the Hotel Polissia, seven stories of square, gaping windows. From where we stood, more than twenty years of looting and abandonment had not significantly worsened the stark, unforgiving aspect of the hotel’s architecture. A few hardy shrubs even peeked from among the freestanding letters of the roof sign. It’s amazing where things will grow when people stop all their weeding.

Between drags on his cigarette, Dennis answered my questions with the jaded economy of someone who had been to this spot a thousand times. “What’s that?” I said, pointing at the building to the left of the hotel.

“Culture palace,” he said.

“What’s a culture palace?”

“Discos.” Another drag. “Movies.”

To our left was a blocky building with a sign reading PECTOPAH. Using my nascent Cyrillic, I decoded this as RESTAURANT. I pointed to a low‑slung gallery that jutted from its side.

“What was there?”

Dennis looked up and removed the cigarette from his mouth.

“Shops.”

The plaza where we stood was gradually surrendering itself to shrubs and moss. Vegetation spilled over its borders and crept along its seams. A set of low, crumbling stairs led up from the plaza’s lower level, purple wildflowers and a few tree saplings poking out from the cracks.

“Don’t step on the moss,” Dennis ordered as we walked up the mossy stairs from the mossy lower level to the mossy upper level.

“Why’s that?” I asked, and hoped he hadn’t seen the contorted tap dance of my reaction.

“The moss… concentrates the radiation,” he said, and tossed his cigarette butt on the ground. The same could have been said for the mushrooms he had freely admitted to gathering in the zone, but I didn’t bother to point it out.

I stopped to take a picture. Dennis dangled another cigarette from his mouth and posed on the concrete path, the pectopah in the distance. Behind his sunglasses, he could have been the bassist for a Ukrainian rock band. FOOTBALL, said the writing on his sleeveless black T‑shirt. SYNTHETIC NATURE. He held up his detector for the camera to see. It read 120. But what did 120 microroentgens mean on a sunny day? More than a little. Less than a lot. Panic in Kiev.

Dennis wandered away along the side of the plaza, his detector in a lazy warble. I lingered in front of the gutted pectopah. There was nothing left but a shell of cracked concrete and twisted metal. I tried to imagine the plaza before the accident, when it had been the center of a living city. A place to meet a friend after work, maybe. Somewhere to have a cup of bad coffee. What was it like to have your entire town evacuated in three hours? To lose not only your house or apartment but also your workplace, your friends, your entire environment? I tried to imagine the terror of that day.

But in the peace that reigned over present‑day Pripyat, it was difficult. I closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face. The trees and grass rustled in the wind. Insects buzzed past on their way to somewhere else. I heard the easy cacophony of the birds. And as Dennis made his way down the plaza, the chirping of his dosimeter dissolved into the birdsong, becoming just another note in nature’s symphony.

I caught up with him at the far corner of the shops, and we headed around back to visit the amusement park. As we walked, I asked Dennis how he had gotten his job. Leading guided tours through the world’s most radioactive outdoor environment didn’t seem like a gig you would find on Craigslist. And Dennis had started early; at twenty‑six, he had already been working for the Chernobyl authority for three years, alternating every two weeks between the zone and Kiev to keep his radioactive dose under the permitted limit. He told me that originally he had worked only in the Kiev office, before getting transferred to the zone. “I asked for it. I wanted to do it instead of sit in front of a computer,” he said, and took a swig of water. “And most people don’t work at all, if the computer has Internet.” Here was someone who believed that boredom was worse for you than radiation.

He went on, recounting how he had read about a doctor who argued that constant, low‑level doses of radiation were actually good for you. “The people who didn’t leave the zone after the accident lived better,” he said, referring to the several hundred aging squatters who have been allowed to live, semi‑legally, in their houses in the zone. “This doctor said they had adapted to the radiation and would die within fifteen years if they suddenly leave, but could live to a hundred if they stay.”

I had heard similar claims before, and I was doubtful. There probably were health benefits for zone squatters, but surely they came from living in a little cottage in the countryside, where they grew their own (albeit contaminated) vegetables and breathed clean (if radioactive) air, instead of being evacuated to a crappy apartment in Kiev. I suggested this to Dennis, that perhaps around here, quality of life just trumped radiation dose. He shrugged. But not everyone in Ukraine was as casual as he was about radiation. He later told me how, whenever he would visit his sister in Kiev, she would make him leave his boots outside.

The amusement park is Pripyat’s iconic feature, an end‑times Coney Island, with a broad paved area surrounded by rides and attractions that are slowly being overcome by rust and weeds. Dennis was more interested in the moss. He was a collector of hotspots, and around here the moss had all the action. Near the ruined bumper car pavilion, he waited for a reading before picking his radiation meter up from a mossy spot on the ground.

“One point five mili,” he said, wiping the meter’s backplate on his fatigues.

We left the amusement park and walked down the street, past the post office, past a low building that Dennis said was a technical school, past more apartment blocks. Turning off the road, we scurried through a large concrete arch attached to another building; Dennis eyed the unstable structure warily as we passed underneath.

We continued through the rear courtyard of the building and into an overgrown area beyond. The warm shade of the forest was alive with the hum of bees. As we walked, I pushed aside branches and squeezed between bushes that grew in our way. At the end of the narrow path was a two‑story building made with pink brick set in a vertical pattern.

“Kindergarten number seven,” said Dennis.

If you have been insufficiently sobered by the sight of a deserted city, Kindergarten No. 7 will do the trick. We came through a dank stairwell into a long, spacious playroom with tall windows on one side, their glass long since smashed out. Thick fronds of peeling, sky‑blue paint curled from the walls. What had been left behind by the looters–or shall we call them the first tourists?–was strewn on the floor and coated with twenty years of dust from the slowly disintegrating ceiling. Mosquitoes made lazy spirals through the humid air.

The door was torn off its hinges. Next to it lay piles of orange play blocks and a mound of papers printed with colorful illustrations–marching elephants, rosy‑cheeked little Soviet children. A gray plastic teddy bear, its face pushed into the back of its hollow head, sat on a moldering pyre of Russian learn‑to‑read posters. I recognized the Cyrillic letter b.

Dennis was by the windows with his detector. “Eighty,” he said. He walked to the far wall. “Five.”

A toy car with a yellow plastic seat just large enough for a single child was parked in the middle of the room. It was missing its wheels and its windshield. Even it had been stripped for parts. On the floor next to it was a child‑size gas mask.

Stepping around pools of stagnant water, we made our way out through the stairwell, pausing in front of some black‑and‑white photographs still hanging on the wall. In them, children played and did exercises in a tidy classroom. With a gnawing temporal vertigo, I felt the pictures snap into familiarity: It was the same room. The destroyed room we had just left. And the toys the children were playing with in the photographs were the same toys we had seen just now, fossilized in dust.

Nikolai picked us up on the street, the car appearing out of nowhere, and we left Pripyat in silence.

The classroom lingered in my mind. I had come to the Exclusion Zone to witness its unexpected and riotous efflorescence, and there was something joyous in the sight of nature rushing into an unpeopled world. But it was a garden fed with suffering. Although the meltdown in Chernobyl was no death sentence for the people of Pripyat–and although most of the children who attended Kindergarten No. 7 are probably alive and well today–at the bare minimum it displaced and terrorized hundreds of thousands of people, and threw a pall of doubt over their health, a sickening uncertainty that will haunt the region for at least a lifetime. In this, the verdant bubble of the zone was unlike any other oasis in the world. It had been wrenched into existence, with violence. Something had created it.

On the far side of the bridge out of Pripyat, we coasted to a stop. Dennis turned to me. “Perhaps you would like to take a picture,” he said. I was confused. Why here? But then my eyes wandered up to the horizon, and for the first time, I saw the reactor in person.

It hunkered in the distance, perhaps a mile away, its latticed cooling tower rising over a nasty confusion of buttressed metal walls. The Sarcophagus. Officially known as the Shelter Object, it had been built to contain the shattered reactor. Floating over an expanse of low forest, it had a strange and massive presence. It could have been a crashed spaceship.

By the time we reached the reactor complex, the day had turned itself inside out. We had heard thunder rumbling in the southeast only moments after I’d first seen the Shelter Object. Now a thick lid of clouds had slid over the sky, and heavy raindrops were striking the car’s metal roof. Our surroundings were similarly changed, overtaken by forbidding expanses of concrete and clusters of squat buildings–the infrastructure for maintaining the reactor building. Through the car’s streaming windshield, I saw a dented metal gate blocking our way and a pair of concrete walls haloed with messy helixes of barbed wire.

On the other side of it all, attended by several spindly yellow construction cranes, was the Shelter Object. I was struck again by its great size. The interlocking metal walls rose in a colossal vault nearly two hundred feet tall, battleship gray streaked with rust, supported on one side by tall, thin buttresses and on another by the giant, blocky steps of the so‑called Cascade Wall. Pipes and bits of scaffolding clung to its battlements, whose flat surfaces were interrupted by a grid of massive metal studs. Catwalks traced the edges of its multiple roofs, and a series of tall, shadowed alcoves notched the top of the north wall, like portals from which giant archers might rain arrows down on the countryside.

I had envisioned this moment differently. Visiting the reactor building, I had assumed, would not be fundamentally different from visiting the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal. But those thoughts vanished under the growing thunderstorm. Instead, I felt an unexpected, visceral repulsion. It was obscene. This thing. A monument to brutality, a madman’s castle under siege from within itself. And it lived. It radiated danger and fear. It had warped the land for miles around, creating its own environment, breathing the Exclusion Zone to life.

There was a visitor center. No gift shop, but there were diagrams and photographs, and an excellent scale model of the Shelter Object. I was met by Julia, a serious woman in her forties who gave me a quick handshake before loosing a torrent of information about the accident and the reactor building. Much of it I already knew, but it took on fresh weight in the aggressive Ukrainian accent of an Exclusion Zone bureaucrat. The visitor center’s picture window gave the lecture additional dramatic punch. Through it we had the world’s best, closest view of the ever‑more‑menacing Shelter Object, now crowned with forks of lightning. And in case that wasn’t enough, there was an electronic readout above the window that measured our radioactive exposure–138 micros at the moment.

“Sarcophagus took two hundred six days to construct, ” said Julia. “Radiation levels at north side of building after accident reached 2,000 rem per hour.” She waved her hand over the model, a perfect replica, two or three feet tall. “On top of building they reached 3,000 rem per hour. This is appalling level. These are area where firemen were working.” I felt a little sick. Even several hundred rem can be fatal, and the first responders to the Chernobyl accident received many times that for every hour they spent on the building.

Thunder rattled the window. With practiced ease, Julia swung open the hinged front wall of the model to reveal a cross‑section of the interior, its wreckage recreated in painstaking detail. With the actual building visible just out the window to the right, the model allowed an intuitive understanding of the gargantuan scale of the reactor–and of the accident that had destroyed it. Flicking my eyes back and forth, it was as if I could see right through the walls of the Shelter Object and into the building’s guts. As Julia continued to reel off facts and figures, she lifted the roof off the turbine hall with the tips of her fingers, a colossal June Cleaver demonstrating how to use an Olympian piece of Tupperware.

The destruction inside was complete. The core’s radiation shield, a two‑thousand‑ton plug of lead that had been blown into the air by the explosion, had landed on its side, and now hung precariously at the top of the core. The core itself was the size of a small building, a thick bucket standing several stories tall. It felt impossible to understand the power embodied in such a machine. A quarter ounce of nuclear fuel holds nearly as much energy as a ton of coal; the core had held more than a hundred thousand times that much.

Now, though, it was empty. Some of the fuel–nobody knows exactly how much–was ejected in the explosion and subsequent fire. The rest melted through the floor of the reactor, a nuclear lava flow that spilled into the lower floors and basements of the reactor building, where it still sits, unapproachably radioactive. Julia pointed to a photograph on the wall that showed some of the lava, a cracked cylinder with a flaring, globular base. “This is elephant foot. Is most famous portion of nuclear lava, in basement of building.” She turned back to the model and indicated a number of tiny flags planted inside the core and around the building. “These are temperature and radioactivity sensors,” she said. “They have been placed by Chernobyl workers.”

I was incredulous. People had actually gone into the reactor core?

Julia nodded. “Yes. Duty cycle is fifteen minutes.”

The idea of rappelling into the empty core made me dizzy. Julia went on, cataloging the Shelter