[Closed] Anyone been to Chernobyl?

aren't you scared that yer knob'll fall out?

Watch this first;
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1991245/

I went to Chernobyl and all i got was this lousy mutation.

This will inspire you to go: http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/

look up Dom jolly's book (travelling to various mad places), he wrote about taking one of the tourist buses that go there...

they parked about a mile out and walked a bit further the guide got the Geiger counter out and it went mental...

**** that!

Wouldn't taking a tour of Milton Keynes be cheaper?

This will inspire you to go: http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/

Love this, even though its been proven to be a fake..

She did do the tour, although not quite as she claims in that right up.

Really, really fancy going there tho.. not sure why tho.

Elena's trip blog is brilliant. Made me want to go.

I am with you on this, would love to go, but her indoors won't have it. may have to make a solo trip

Hmm, thinking of loading up my Vaya, and then riding around..

A mate went with work (he's a geologist). The photos he uploaded makes it look like he went on holiday to COD 4, properly sobering too. Will try and upload a couple later.

A girl at work went, not really looking forward to it but she said it turned out to be really interesting and quite moving.

Hmm, thinking of loading up my Vaya, and then riding around..

When jnr is older and i don't feel guilty about pissing off for a bit, this is what I plan on doing 😀

I would go, but not until Ive already got cancer.

No doubt Chernobyl has been to you.

Got fascinated when reading Martin Cruz Smith's 'Wolves eat Dogs' - a detective type story set in the exclusion zone / Black villages.
( Just checked, there are some on ebay for reasonable prices)

Really enjoyed the book - may have to read it again.

Chris

Pripyat- come for the atmosphere, stay because snorks ate you.

[img] [/img]

I'd love to have a wander around Pripyat, remember reading a great National Geographic article on it once, just looks like a great snapshot in time of the USSR. Definitely on the bucket list (though perhaps when closer to the bucket).

Northwind - Stalker was actually the thing that sparked my fascination with the place 🙂

We could carve that on your tombstone, except you won't have one because you got eaten.

Is it not a health hazzard still?

(though perhaps when closer to the bucket).

The longer you stay there, the closer the bucket is.

Yeah but you're only going for a day, patriot.

Ah right. Oddly, I can see the attraction to going there.

It'll make a great conversation point if nothing else.

And you'd never need a lantern again...

do you have to go on an organised tour, or could you just hop on your bike and ride through it?
what tyres for reactor core lava?

do you have to go on an organised tour, or could you just hop on your bike and ride through it?
what tyres for reactor core lava?

AFAIK there are orgainsed tours.. Thats how Elena's trip blog was proved to be not all that she made it out to be..

As for rocking up and riding through it?

I'm gonna do some serious looking on the interwebz later, as I really have a hankering to do this.

...What Geiger Counter for ...

Chris

There was a BBC documentary where a journalist went round the area, with an escort. The area was out of bounds, but some locals were nipping in to the forbidden zone to harvest vegetables and then cooking them - he was offered a very radioactive mushroom soup and declined....

That would be an ace location for a Danny Mackaskill video.......

Surely after a wander around the clothes would very contaminated and need to be destroyed !?!?!

If you rode a bike that would also need to be binned ?

I want to go [url= http://gakuran.com/gunkanjima-ruins-of-a-forbidden-island/ ]here[/url]!

Used to be some good info on Pripyat on 28dl, there were a few folk from there had visited...

Start gradually with a trip to S****horpe

A fair number of people live in the exclusion zone for the free land and housing. A lot of them are pensioners on fixed incomes who are over the life expectancy anyway. An increased chance of cancer in x years is acceptable against living elsewhere with an increased chance of death from malnutrition and cold.

If you really wanted to hike in I'm sure you could avoid the cordon but I have no great desire to bicker with Ukrainian security agencies. Other abandoned Soviet industrial towns are available!

Not sure if this is public or not EDIT it wasn't 🙁

I went a few years ago.
Pripyat is amazing. Standing right next to the old reactor is very freaky.
Defo go.

Hmmm, need to start working out the logistics of this..

Years ago I went to one of those "make yourself a better salesman" presentations. The speaker made a pretty convincing argument that if you have enough of something and you try hard enough you can sell it to someone, somewhere.....guess this proves him right.

http://tour2chernobyl.com/faq.html

[quote> http://tour2chernobyl.com/faq.html

Looks good,but everything points to the fact that these have closed down, and that you can't get a guided tour anymore 😥

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.

[url= http://www.urbanxphotography.co.uk/pripyat-2011 ]Chernobyl/Pripyat[/url]

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

[img] [/img]

1979 [i]Stalker[/i] 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:

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.