Inside the Bizarre Subculture That Lives to Explore Chernobyl’s Dead Zone
Just 3 kilometers from the reactor is the plant’s company town, called Pripyat. Today, the bleak radioactive ghost town’s abandoned apartment buildings slowly fall apart and pay quiet homage to the nearly 50,000 people who fled. Pripyat is full of still-lifes; a table set for dinner, a Ferris wheel squeaking in an elegiac, fruitless wait for children. Wild boar snuffle through rusted playgrounds, and kindergarten napping areas are scattered with wide-eyed, broken dolls, thick with radioactive dust. From the top of a high-rise, one can see “the sarcophagus,” 3 kilometers in the distance, covering Reactor No. 4, which sits cracked and rusted and wafting radioactive dust. Twelve-foot-long catfish swim in its long-defunct cooling pond.