Pripyat & the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

In the early hours of 26 April 1986, Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded during a botched safety test, releasing roughly 400 times more radioactive material than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The nearby city of Pripyat, built in 1970 to house plant workers and their families, was not evacuated until 36 hours later, by which time many residents had already been exposed to significant radiation while going about a normal Saturday — accounts describe people sunbathing, fishing, and holding weddings within sight of the burning reactor, unaware of the danger. Around 49,000 residents were evacuated by bus in a few hours, told they would return within days; they never did.

The wider Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, an area of roughly 2,600 square kilometres around the plant, remains largely off-limits to permanent habitation, though a small number of self-settlers — mostly elderly people who returned illegally in the years after the disaster — continued to live there for decades. In the absence of human activity, the zone has become an unplanned wildlife refuge, with populations of wolves, lynx, and the rare Przewalski's horse (reintroduced in the 1990s) now found in numbers exceeding many managed nature reserves, even as studies continue to debate the long-term genetic effects of chronic radiation exposure on these populations. Since the 1990s, and especially after the area featured in popular video games and the 2019 television series Chernobyl, licensed tour operators have brought a growing stream of visitors into the zone under strict radiation monitoring — a practice interrupted in 2022 when Russian forces occupied the site for five weeks during the invasion of Ukraine, reportedly disturbing radioactive soil with military vehicles and trenches dug into the highly contaminated "Red Forest."