It seems like I should remember the Chernobyl accident. I was eight; that seems old enough. And it was a pretty big huge deal. But I don't remember it at all. Twenty-five years later (yikes), they send tour groups there. I hate tour groups, but I could not have talked my way into the exclusion zone.
I was bracing myself for it to be horrible and depressing. (On the bus from Kiev they tried to show a documentary which probably was pretty depressing, but the DVD kept stopping and finally they gave up.) But you know what? I thought it was beautiful. At the power plant itself there's not much obvious evidence of disaster, aside from some memorials, and the buildings and machinery are big and dramatic and it happened to be a clear day with a bright blue sky and the sun shone on the rust and the angles and the trees and the water (artificial rivers and a lake for cooling purposes, but still sun shining on water usually looks nice) and it was all very striking and very pretty. Which was pretty weird.
Chernobyl (Chornobyl in Ukrainian) is the town after which the power plant was named. It's mostly deserted now, but a few people do monitoring and administrative work there and there are a few houses with little gardens out front (yikes). At the power plant itself, the three reactors that didn't explode stayed operational after the accident. The last one was shut off in 2001; apparently for political, not safety, reasons. There is still containment work to be done, but it's currently on hold because of money and problems with contractors. A few people still work at the plant for monitoring, but on a Sunday it was pretty deserted. (The cafeteria was open, though -- maybe only for tour groups? They assured us the food was safe and no one made the obvious dumb joke of asking if it was local.) Pripyat is the town where the plant workers lived and it's now completely abandoned. It wasn't evacuated until a full day after the accident, though. The people were told that the accident wasn't severe ("to maintain order") and that they would be allowed back in three days (they weren't). A few people refused to leave and were dead within a few weeks. The people who left were eventually allowed back to get some of their things, but no one ever lived there again.
All of which sounds depressing as hell. Is depressing as hell. Plus, everyone who helped put out the fire and contain the disaster died soon after. And the people in charge at Chernobyl were so un-glastnost-y that Mikhail Gorbachev found out about the explosion from Sweden, where elevated radioactivity was detected days later after the wind blew it there. (That's the story, anyway.)
But like I said, it doesn't look like disaster or destruction now. Even the abandoned buildings in Pripyat were more interesting than depressing, to me anyway. More than that, though, the people there really don't play the tragedy card. I mean, they recognize it as tragedy (how could you not?) -- there are lots of memorials, for example -- but it was 25 years ago and life goes on and they don't seem to be actively mourning. And, Ukrainians have this dark sick twisted sense of humor that is probably good for coping and also makes them hilarious, once you get over feeling bad for laughing. I went to this exhibition for the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl and it had a whole section about the jokes people told after the accident. (The only one I remember was something like 'Reagan calls up the Pentagon and says "Cancel the Soviet nuclear offensive program. They've gone self-service."') Yuri, our guide, was wearing a Hard Rock Cafe Chernobyl t-shirt. The front of his shirt also said "Save the planet" and the back had what looked like a tour schedule, only it said things like Iodine 131 and Strontium 90. Before he took us to what was the school in Pripyat he said, "This is perfect school -- no teachers. But it is also perfect school for teachers -- no children. Perfect school, now we have it. Let's go."
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