Chernobyl, Part 2

Following our foreshortened Kindergarten visit, we moved on to the reactors.  To do this, we had to pass into the 10 km Zone of Absolute Resettlement and through another checkpoint.

All the reactors were built in twos-- twins, if you will. 

On the approach, we saw Reactors 5 and 6, which were still under construction at the time of the incident.  It was one of the biggest shocks to me, to see the cranes surrounding them; I counted six.  They were obviously hauling ass to construct these as fast as they could; they believed they had found their ticket to success and were moving to capitalize upon it.  For the first time it started to sink in, how quickly they had to move out, and that now these cranes were unusable due to their contamination.  They will remain like this forever.

In the distance we could see Reactor 3, the twin to Reactor 4.  It continued to be in use until 2000, when America paid them to decommission it.

On the right you can see twin Reactors 1 and 2, on either side of the tall tower

One of my favorite subjects to shoot was Marcel, a student from Heidelberg University.  He wore a white canvas suit and the mask provided to us almost constantly.  He's a very smart guy, studying to teach philosophy and physics, and knew that there was nothing to worry about in terms of radiation exposure.  But, the fear was there, so he played a little psychological trick on himself to make himself feel more comfortable.  I thought it was a great solution, plus it made him a very dynamic subject to shoot.  Poor guy had Armande pointed at him a lot, but he took it with grace and humor.

Next we went to a bridge fairly close to Reactors 1 and 2.  They used to raise catfish there, I'm not sure why.  Anyway, they still live and breed in the reactor cooling stream that runs close by.  They've grown to enormous proportions, but our guide purports it's not due to radiation, rather to the fact that they have no natural predators.  It also doesn't help that we fed them a stupid amount of bread, and they're fed daily by tourists.  None of my pictures of the ginormous fish turned out.  So here's a bridge instead:

Directly behind me was an administrative area (people still work this closely to Reactor 4), where we weren't allowed to take pictures- "in case of terrorists..." I personally couldn't see anything that any terrorist would want to do anything with, but, whatever.  Why is it that when someone says, "hey, don't take a picture of that boring building," the first thing you want to do is take a picture of that boring building?  On principle, I suppose. 

Another memorial.  This one says, "Life For Life" and has plaques with the names of the firefighters and other people who lost their lives as a direct result of the explosion.  Also next to is was a statue of Prometheus holding a giant ball of fire.  They really aren't very subtle about their memorials, I noticed.

 Next we went to Reactor 4.  We were allowed within 300 meters of it.  It sounds like a lot, but it totally isn't.  We felt like we were right next to it.  Earlier this year, a 600 square meter chunk of the roof of the sarcophagus collapsed due to heavy snowfall.  The "sarcophagus" was built in 1986, shortly after the incident.

That looked a hell of a lot closer than 900 ft sounds.

Wanna know what's in there?  200 tons of radioactive corium, 30 tons of radioactive dust, and 16 tons of uranium and plutonium.  And they have little idea of what's actually going on in there.  I read a book where the writer hypothesized that if there's water running through it (there totally is- it's leaking through the ill-constructed roof), it could be refining the uranium and plutonium to the point where it could react again.  Super.  It's also becoming radioactive itself and is seeping through the the reactor's floor to the soil underneath. 

During the construction of the sarcophagus, they used robots to throw debris that had fallen on Reactor 3 to the ground below, to another robot that would then bury it (great place for it, eh?).  However, the radiation was too high for these robots to handle (they even imported high-tech robots) and they started failing after only a few days of working.  So "they" decided to utilize "bio-robots," otherwise known as "people."  These men were outfitted in heavy lead suits, given some shovels and a minute to run like hell on the roof, toss a couple of shovel-fulls, and back.  They received such a high dose of radiation that following this, they received enough radiation for a lifetime and were never allowed to return.  There's a good short documentary here: http://disinfo.com/2011/04/the-biorobots-who-cleaned-up-chernobyl/

This says 4.42- it's hard to read.

They are currently building a new sarcophagus which is purported to last more than 100 years.  It looks like this:

There are totally people in that tiny yellow thing dangling from a crane about a thousand feet from Reactor 4. I bet they feel super safe.

 They expect it to replace the old sarcophagus in 2015. 

I'd like to talk for a second about half-lives.  If you don't know (you probably do), a half-life is the amount of time it takes for a substance, in physics it usually refers to radioactive substances, to decay to half the amount it was when it was originally measured.  The half-life of cesium is 30 years, which is what's causing most of the gamma radiation.  It'll take about 300 years for it to decay to the point of normal background radiation.  I'm not sure exactly which isotopes of plutonium and uranium they used in Chernobyl, but plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years and uranium-235 has a half-life of 703.8 million years (these are some of the most-commonly used isotopes in nuclear reactors, says Wikipedia).  So... the human race will probably be long gone by the time Chernobyl is habitable again.  The hundred years the new sarcophagus is supposed to last pales in comparison.

We were actually quite lucky that it was raining the entire time.  Not only did it add to the atmosphere (other than totally mucking up my shots with poor lighting), but it made the radioactive dust stick to the ground, instead of floating through the air and attaching itself to me and my new friends.  

We left Reactor 4 after about 20 minutes.  We all took some pictures in front of the reactor, some joking around, some serious, but all seem vastly inappropriate now.  I think at the time, we needed to play a little to help relieve the tension of what we were seeing and experiencing and feeling.

Next we stopped by the entrance sign to Pripyat, but we wouldn't be entering until the next day. 

We then went to a train yard.  It was freaking incredible. 

Our guide told us, "Don't go in there.  But I won't be watching."

So I totally went in.

Not even to the end of Day One.  Lucky for you and I, unlucky for my computer and Photoshop.  As a quick note, I'm a total amateur with PS, so I've been doing minimal editing: just some cropping and adjusting levels and lighting, etc.  So I'm not presenting you with something completely dissimilar to what I saw or anything.