I had a watch of this, which was quite good. IIRC the subtitles were in English.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01m0nwh

The upshot of it is that the reactor is still humming away under a sarcopahgus that is not really very safe, and they need millions of pounds to sort it out but no-ones particularly interested in doing anything about it.

Chernobyl/Pripyat

An ex-colleague of mine has been a few times – and photographed every square inch of it by the looks of it.

Certainly a morbidly fascinating place!

I have been in the exclusion zone on the Belarusian side. We were picked up by the head of the police (a friend of the friend we were visiting) and a soldier at the local bus station. I don’t think it something which you can just rock up and do. We were driven around the entire exclusion zone up to as close as you can get to the Ukrainian border. I think this is where the old reactor core is buried (which some people – now deceased – tried to steal). It was a very strange day. Amidst the old buildings there are now lots of Elk and Buffalo. No one is going to bother them there I suppose. Just outside the second checkpoint there is a huge map of the area where they marked out all the dwellings which had been evacuated. Quite eerie.

My colleagues and I were invited by the PR company promoting Stalker back when it launched. They were clearly scraping the barrel when they called me – I worked on a tech title as a features editor, but nothing too game-centric. I looked into it – it’s pretty low risk with the right local guides and equipment – but ultimately turned it down.I hadn’t had kids at that point, and I thought it a little ghoulish to visit the site of so many deaths as part of an effort to promote a piece of entertainment.

promoting Stalker

1979 Stalker FTW.

Pieface: that’s not really true, tho : http://m.euractiv.com/details.php?aid=504163

Thread resurrection time, I’ve just been reading an article on Flipboard about visiting Chernobyl which I thought the OP might be interested in reading:

Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/science/Chernobyl–My-Primeval–Teeming–Irradiated-Eden.html

The upshot of it is that the reactor is still humming away under a sarcopahgus that is not really very safe, and they need millions of pounds to sort it out but no-ones particularly interested in doing anything about it.

Yeah, it’s pretty much total borlox actually

Thread resurrection time, I’ve just been reading an article on Flipboard about visiting Chernobyl which I thought the OP might be interested in reading:

Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/science/Chernobyl–My-Primeval–Teeming–Irradiated-Eden.html

Thanks for that CZ, very interesting 🙂

mmm, indeed, a good read.

Found this on YouTube, not watched it all yet but it looks fascinating:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETtFIuOaEPE[/video]

Thanks, I spotted it this evening and read through it, and remembered this thread, so I thought others might like to see it as well. It really made me want to go there, if only to see just how quickly seemingly ‘permanent’ human habitations can be subsumed back into wilderness in a relatively short space of time. We’re more ephemeral than we really like to think we are… 😀

You should have a look at englishrussia then, there’s zillions of photorepkrtages of abandoned towns and factories there.

Hasn’t some of the coffin recently caved in on the plant?

Wouldn’t be going if it’s the case.

Little-known fact about Chernobyl: the last remaining wrecks of the German fleet scuttled in Scapa Flow are one of the few sources of quality steels and alloys left in the world, which are not contaminated by radiation from Chernobyl. Wrecks like these are regularly pillaged for metals for very delicate scientific instruments.

Little-known fact about Chernobyl: the last remaining wrecks of the German fleet scuttled in Scapa Flow are one of the few sources of quality steels and alloys left in the world, which are not contaminated by radiation from Chernobyl. Wrecks like these are regularly pillaged for metals for very delicate scientific instruments.

That’s not really Chernobyl’s fault. They’ve been used for that pretty much since we started splitting the atom, most notably in Japan in 1945.

Globati, do they not have protected/grave site like status? I’d be a little annoyed if my final resting place was plundered to make stuff

Globati, do they not have protected/grave site like status? I’d be a little annoyed if my final resting place was plundered to make stuff

AFAIK, the only war grave in Scapa Flow is the Royal Oak which was torpedoed early in WWII, with the loss of over 800 souls.

The German fleet was scuttled to prevent it falling into British hands after the German surrender at the end of WWI. Unless some sailors were slow getting off their ships, I don’t think anyone lost their lives.

Cheers Zokes, scuttled should have given it away really 😳

No, the ships were empty of crew, they were scuttled by a German CO who was in charge up there!….he had ordered his men to spend the year following the war welding doors open and planting charges under the noses of the British soldiers!….incredible.
Eight Germans were shot trying to scuttle one last ship, this was 1919 and they are officially the last recorded dead of WW1.

The war grave up there is HMS-something? that was sunk by a German U-boat in WW2 i believe.

(edit-zokes got in there first)

No I didn’t becoz I’m too far away. But I will visit.