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Chernobyl

A doll, likely arranged by a tourist, dressed with a gas mask sits on a chair among an old television and hundreds of gas masks lying on the floor of abandoned School Number 3 in the ghost town of Pripyat not far from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
A doll, likely arranged by a tourist, dressed with a gas mask sits on a chair among an old television and hundreds of gas masks lying on the floor of abandoned School Number 3 in the ghost town of Pripyat not far from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Photo: Sean Gallup (Getty Images)

Chernobyl occupies a unique place in the cultural imagination, playing on fears of nuclear energy and the Cold War as well as nostalgia and fascination with the Soviet Union. So often, the past is knocked down or paved over. But the nuclear 1986 meltdown at Chernobyl meant that simply wasn’t an option given the risk of radioactive contamination. That means the site and surrounding town are still standing as a testament to the damage wrought by a series of human errors that led to the meltdown, a nuclear energy-created snow globe.

The site has become a huge tourist destination and the hubris that led to the meltdown have been immortalized in an HBO miniseries. Cleanup efforts have continued, including using robots to deal with the most radioactive parts of the reactor site. In a dark twist, climate change could also end up posing issues for the site; in 2020, wildfires spread in the exclusion zone. Though likely caused by arsonists (specifically, suspected fanatics of the 1972 Soviet sci-fi classic Roadside Picnic), the forests Chernobyl are under the same heat stress as others around the world.

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