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.

Chernobyl, Part 1

I do have some things to say about Kiev, but I'm too eager to tell y'all about Chernobyl, so I'll get to that later. 

Even though most of you reading this were alive when it happened, many of us were too young to remember it, or too far away to pay too close attention to the catastrophe happening half a world away. 

On April 26, 1986 at 1:24 am, some scientists were doing research on one of the nuclear reactors, Reactor 4, in the middle of the night.  Suffice it to say, science happened, and it wasn't pretty.  There was an explosion, resulting in a fire.  The roof of Reactor 4 blew off.  The Chernobyl firemen responded to it, thinking it was just a fire.  They ran in without any protection against radiation, receiving such high doses of radiation that they all died very painful deaths from radiation poisoning within weeks of the incident.  Their sacrifice ensured that the Zone of Exclusion (because Zone of Contamination just doesn't sound good) had only a mere 30 kilometer radius, instead of hundreds. 

Radioactive dust blew over the area.  The wind carried particles as far as Sweden, although the main recipients of fallout were Ukraine (obviously), Russia and next-door neighbor, Belarus. 

The Soviet Union didn't notify any civilians at the time. 

The official Soviet death count is 31. 

Which is bullshit.



We began our tour in Kiev, where we met our small group of co-adventurers.  Our group consisted of about 24-26 people from all over: a couple from Italy, a few guys from the Netherlands, a few from Germany, a couple from Latvia, some from the Czech Republic, a guy from New Zealand, and some others I didn't catch.  There was one other guy from the US, and me.  There were 3 other women in our group, all accompanying their significant others, exhibiting varying levels of interest in the trip at all.  Almost everyone spoke great English.  I watched with fascination as people from two countries, neither English-speaking, spoke to each other in their common language, English.  It made me feel very lucky that I grew up in a country where my native language is so widely utilized.

Following a 3 hour drive to the Zone of Exclusion, we arrived at The Edge.  Chernobyl is still guarded by the Ukrainian military and we required special permissions and documents for entry, provided by the company, Chernobylwel.com (e), whose motto is, "See, feel, experience...but do not touch!"  We filed out of the bus and showed our passports to a nondescript uniformed man with a checklist of our names.  No one was arrested on the spot, so I suppose that was a good start.

They don't allow you to take pictures of military installments, specifically the checkpoints.  Our guide, Michaela, informed us very seriously not to point a camera at them, stating that they tend to, "shoot first, ask questions later."  I'm sure that this is an exaggeration, but none of us were willing to test the hypothesis.

That says, "Chernobyl."  Obviously.

 Three thousand people still work in Chernobyl and 200 people have remained there in full-time residence.  There are two working shifts to minimize radiation exposure to their employees: 15/15- 15 days in the Zone and 15 days away from it, and 3/4- 3 days in the Zone, 4 days away, then switched. 

I'm getting to the pictures, hang with me.  Or skip ahead if you want, I won't mind.  Hell, I won't even know.

We arrived at our hotel, the touted Chernobyl Hotel, boasting 2 whole stars.  Seriously, they shouldn't have tried so hard.  Most of the group had been living out of hostels, so sleeping 3 to a room was a pleasure for most.  I shared a room with Michaela, seeing as how there were so few females around.

Our first stop was a memorial garden (there seemed like there were about 50 memorials) in Chernobyl Town, where the employees live.  There were a lot of themes from the Book of Revelation and Wormwood references. 

Revelation 8:10-11:
The third angel sounded, and a great star fell from heaven, burning like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of waters. The name of the star is called Wormwood; and a third of the waters became wormwood, and many men died from the waters, because they were made bitter.

The third angel.

There were rows of signs labelled with the names of the settlements, white on one side and black with a red stripe diagonal across it, symbolizing that they will never again be inhabited.  In fact, most of the settlements were small, rural villages consisting mostly of wooden buildings.  Wood cannot be decontaminated, so they were razed to the  ground with bulldozers and buried.  

It rained pretty much the entire time we were there, so excuse the rainspots.

 The people who were brought in to clean up the mess were called "liquidators" and they had very little protection against the radiation.  They also had a memorial, along with the firefighters who perished in the initial fire.  

Next to Chernobyl Town fire station

Our next stop was a kindergarten.  Our guides pulled out their Geiger counters to show us how the radiation has soaked into the ground. 

That says 11.69

Now might be a good time to talk a little about radiation.  I won't get too much into the details (mostly because I don't know them), but the basics are these: there are three types of radiation: alpha, beta and gamma.  Alpha is the most dangerous, but we weren't in contact with any.  It can also be stopped with a piece of paper- it doesn't carry a lot of punch power.  Beta stays in your body forever, but won't penetrate a thin piece of plywood.  I was only around this when we were right next to the reactor.  Gamma is the most common around the Zone, and the least dangerous.  Your body figures it out and gets rid of it eventually. 

There is background radiation everywhere.  You're sitting in it now.  It's usually pretty low, way below 0.50 microsieverts per hour.  The average American gets about 6 microsieverts per year, the global average around 3.  Inside the Zone, there were many places where it was well below 0.5/hr, mostly inside.  However, the soil in the Zone absorbed the radioactive dust from the fallout and is still radiating.  Therefore, most of the radiation I received was from the ground, not the Reactor.  Moss absorbs and radiates even more than the dirt.  During my two-day stay in the Zone, I received approximately 4 microsieverts of radiation, the equivalent of about one x-ray or one intercontinental flight.  The "safe" amount to be exposed to is about 100 microsieverts a day.  Sorry if I got any of that wrong, but I don't think it's blatantly wrong.  Correct me if I am.

In any case, I was made to leave long before I wanted to.  I shot 3 rooms out of about 6.  Bummertown.

Well, it's late and I just realized I'm only about 13% through my photos, so expect several parts to this post.  I'll also probably create a slightly different album on Facebook, so if you're really into more, there'll be these and others.  Stick with me, shit starts to get real.

Seriously, Switzerland?!

Seriously?  Is a place allowed to be this beautiful?  I've been a lot of places in my life, and Switzerland definitely deserves a place near the top.  Right up there with the Santorini sunset, the white sands of Aruba, the Sistine chapel. 

The family I'm nannying for runs an advertisement company whose main client is Smart Cars.  You know them, the funny-looking half-car.  Every year they have an event called Smart Times in a different European country; this year was in Buochs, near Luzern, Switzerland.

First off, owners of Smart cars are kind of nuts.  It's almost like a cult. 

This exists.

 

We stayed in a beautiful hotel that overlooked the Lake of Lucerne.  I had a room to myself, and every morning I woke up to a gorgeous view.  

This.  I woke up to this.

 

We fed the birds nearly every day.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had some free time our first real evening there.  I took myself to Luzern and walked around.  It has a surreal quality.  I wish I'd had more time to learn about the history.

They had these beautiful wooden bridges spanning the river.  

This says the bridge was built in 1408, destroyed by a storm in 1566, rebuilt in 1568 and renovated in 1889.  This bridge is older than our country.  By, like, a lot.

 

The bridges were adorned with paintings.  Many were missing because of a fire that damaged one of the bridges in the 1990's. They depict various scenes from throughout Luzern's history and date back to the 17th century.  There were originally 158 of these (not all containing skeletons), but only 47 were recovered and 30 restored after the fire.  I'm glad they chose this one:

Oh yeah, that one time there were skeletons everywhere.

 

 I'm disappointed to report that in the week I was in Switzerland, I failed to see a single cuckoo-adorned clock and only found three specialty Swiss chocolate shops.  They were excruciatingly expensive, but I bucked up and bought some chocolate for my mom.  I did, however, find and buy a Swiss Army knife.  

 

This place has an absurdly high standard of living.  They're all paid quite well, but they'd better be to afford living there.  One evening I was on my own and bought a chicken hoagie sandwich, some french fries and a cup of tea.   The total came to 28 Swiss Francs, or $30 freaking US dollars.  Yikes.

During the time I was there, Luzern was having some festival celebrating 75 years since it's founding... or something like that.  Every night they highlighted various bands that played throughout the city: some in front of churches, some in front of fountains, in the streets, on stages in front of their art museum.  It was great.  The first night I was there I treated myself to a fancy dinner outside listening to a band. Wunderschön.  

Not too shabby for the looking-at, either.

Frida and I spent a lot of time together during Smart Times, because both her parents were super busy with the event.  At the beginning, we got along very well, but she's used to having her parents around a lot, and started to get very upset by their absence.  By the end, I think she blamed me for it, or at least associated me with being sad about her parents.  A week later, and she's just now able to have fun with me again.  I think having me gone for a long weekend helped.  But, we had some really good times.   

The first day we went to Wirzweli- an amusement area for kids at the top of a mountain, accessible by gondola.  It had a playground and and alpine slide.  Apparently there was more, but it was more than an hour long hike away from where the gondola landing was.  Who the hell thinks it's a good idea to take a 4 year-old on that long of a hike?  We tried to find it, but got lost a few times.  The locals tried to help, but their German is unintelligible for actual Germans, let alone me.  It's very bouncy in cadence and hard to follow.  Poor Frida trooped on for probably 4 miles, round trip.  But it sure was pretty up there.

You could hear the clanging of the gigantic cow bells echoing off the mountains.

She cracks me up.

Aren't we cute?  Yeah, we're cute.

At Smart Times they had a kids corner, which saved my ass.  The girls working there were all very sweet and hung out with me and Frida.  They had a face painting station, which had hilarious results.

 The second day, the paint dyed her eyebrows bright pink.  They stayed that way for 4 days.  I laughed every time I looked at her, which really pissed her off.  Which made it cuter.  How 80's punk is that?!

 

In the end, I was somewhat happy to return "home" to Vienna, even though the drive was interminable.  11 hours in a car with three tired adults and a 4 year-old who hates you is pretty miserable.  But, Switzerland definitely bought its way into my heart with low clouds, bright green grass and fresh air.