Pripyat & Chernobyl - May 2010

[Marley85]

brilliant just brillant thats one of the best reports iv ever seen !!!!

 

[scrappy]

great report write up! thanks for sharing. really want to go here myself!

 

[UrbanX]

Cheers everyone! I would highly recommend it as a 'once in a lifetime' experience. Especially to anyone that has the sorts of interests that we do.

Actually the night I came out of Prypiat I heard of an abandonned Soviet Nuclear HQ: Large enough to drive HGVs around in, and twice the size of the Royal Albert Hall. Only problem was that it is high up in the mountains, and 800km south. Cue a 15 hour train journey across the Ukraine, and the most expensive taxi ride of my life...Report coming up soon!

Visiting Prypiat does change something in you.
When I returned, a few people asked me if I was still going to bother driving hours on end to stand next to a locked ROC post in the pouring rain? Of course I will.

 

[muppix]

Well Done UrbanX, great report!

I'm heading that way myself later this year. Question: if you're not allowed to put anything on the ground, where does that leave you with regard to using a tripod? Surely a metallic object is no worse than your own feet, for argument's sake?

Cheers,
m.

 

[krela]

I have to agree, this is the best report of a Pripyat visit I've read. It clearly had quite an effect on you.

Thank you for taking the time to write and share it.

 

[beccy]

Seriously awesome shots :O

 

[BFG316]

Fantastic photos, excellent report and very emotively written.

Thanks for sharing.

 

[Mr Sam]

fantastic stuff me and the Mrs were watching the 1996 Horizon documenty this morning and really want togo

great pics and write up thanks for sharing





http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5968506788418521112#

that should be the 45 minute documentry with footage from 1991 and 1996

 

[UrbanX]

Cheers for the kind comments!

Go for it Mr Sam! If yoiu need any info just PM me. Thanks for the link, I'll try and watch that tonight.

Muppix: You've hit the nail on the head there - Tripods are absolutely fine to use in Pripyat.

 

[lilli]

Oops ... I think everyone thats been there has broken the " Sit or place photo or video equipment on the ground" !!

Some very nice pics Are the kittys still cross eyed?

 

[wherever i may roam]

I really enjoyed reading your report mate,nice one

 

[CHRIS K]

Hi just joined the site last week been on nearly every night since ! . What can i say BLOODY HELL ! the whole report and pics are sending shivers down my spine absolutley amazing would love to go. Thanks.

 

[UrbanX]

Cheers Chris (Welcome to the Forum BTW!)

The acoustics in Pripyat are undescribable. Even in the UYK in the dead of night when you think it's silent there's always the faint hum of a road a few miles away. Or the high frequency buzz of something electrical. In Pripyat there's not even electricity, it's so, so silent. I really want to go back but am freaked out (probably unreasonably) about the radiation!

 

[sYnc_below]

Amazing report

Read every word and lingered over every picture, you have serious balls for going anywhere near there but the results are incredible....I only joined a couple of days ago and this is one the best reports I've read so far

 

[neill]

I was at the Cheltenham Science Festival today where there was a large exhibition by EDF Energy. I was talking to the exhibitors and it turned out that a number of them were workers from the Hinkley Nuclear Power Station. I was chatting to one of the older exhibitors and mentioned Chernobyl and this report. They are all understandably sensitive to the Chernobyl disaster but he went on to tell me a fascinating story. He was on duty at the Hinkley Nuclear Station when the Chernobyl disaster happened. An alarm signal went off in their own control room from a highly sensitive external radiation detector, shortly followed by a second. They then had to check the whole power station and had no detectors showing any leak inside the plant, this they did again and again. They started a safety shut down of the reactor until they could find the cause of the alarms going off, and then called a 'Central Control Authority' as they doing so. It was then that the 'Central Authority' said they had similar alarms from other Nuclear plants across the UK. They were told not to shut down the reactor but keep checking and reporting as the other plants were doing. If all the Nuclear plants were shut down it would have put the lights out in Britain! They also found out that the same alarms were going off in other countries, first in Sweden, and then across northern Europe. The Swedish plant had detected the rise in radiation levels a day before we did in the UK. By comparing data they had a good idea that something very bad had happened behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Block. It was a further three days before the Soviet Government admitted there was something wrong. All this time workers were checking, checking and checking again internal and external levels. The guy I talked to said he aged 5 years in those 3 days. When I was leaving I asked if he would like to visit Chernobyl and Pripyat on one of the new 'tourest tours' to which he replyed 'You must be bloody joking!'

This makes me admire even more this and other reports of it's like!

 

[UrbanX]

Wow, cheers for that Neill, great insight.
On the way between Kiev and Pripyat our guide put a documentary on, there was a guy on there who was testing levels in Pripyat on the morning of 26th April. The levels were 15,000 times 'safe', He was in a full NBC suit, but children were just playing innocently around him in shorts and T-shirts. He told his superiors the levels, and yet they still denied the extent of the danger.

The guy, who must have been in his sixties, just broke down. He just had his head in his hands on the desk, just sobbing "I can't live with myself".

 

[Derelicta]

interesting report, well done with enough pics.

 

[SCL001]

I don't usually comment but i just could not take my eyes of this report and read each word and spent time looking at each one of your pictures in detail (which is not like me, i tend to skim read picking out details).Takes a bloody good report to keep me nterested, well done!

Absolutly fantastic!

 

[gingrove]

I remember when the fallout cloud arrived in this country. I was working in Health Physics at Harwell at the time and the first that we knew about it was when other people in my building started to call the office saying that the readings on the routine air samples were high. So I went up to the roof to run an activated charcoal sample to see if we were getting any any radioactive iodine. When the sample proved positive we knew that it was from the reactor. A few days later after the news footage had been released I got the job of collecting up all of our surplus respirators and protective clothing so that the guys over there would have something beter than the cotton masks that we saw them using in the films of the clean up operations. I even got an interview on the local TV news about it. Did you take the radiation monitors or do they provide them ? I would love to go and see the place but I think that I would probably want to take my own monitoring gear and a respirator! Fantastic Report and I have passed it on to several of my friends in Health Physics who have all been very impressed!

 

[UrbanX]

Wow, would be interesting to hear their take on visiting the zone! I vaguely remember it happening, I was no mre than a toddler, I guess it's something that I grown up always aware of.

Everyone bought their own monitors. The guide had just one for himself, and that was all.

We did create a good amount of panic on the plane to Kiev with them tho: As we reached 30,000ft a cacophony of ten geiger warning sirens could be heard coming from the back of the plane!