Back Talk–When Spooky is Normal: Lessons Learned While Visiting Chernobyl

There are no libraries in the Exclusion Zone of Chernobyl. The 30-kilometer radius area to which access is allowed only with considerable precautions is cut off from all the realities of our profession still, nearly 35 years after the disaster. Chernobyl is the name of the town 20 kilometers south of the reactor complex near the Ukraine-Belarus border where extraordinarily bad Soviet management led to the worst nuclear disaster the planet has yet seen. The recent HBO series tells the story powerfully: a stress test on a new reactor went badly, steam built up and blew the lid off the reactor, and the consequent exposure to oxygen ignited an explosion and fire that scattered incredibly toxic debris to the atmosphere, where winds from south and east carried the debris to western Europe and (especially) north into neighboring Belarus. Over 100 villages (or hamlets) had to be abandoned completely and the "company town" of Pripyat, a couple of miles from the reactor, was evacuated and now left to deteriorate slowly. It will be some 24. millennia before humans can permanently live and thrive again in this area. Since 2010, one can visit the sites. the author hasten to say that it's perfectly safe to do so in the sense that the continuing levels of radiation are now low enough that the exposure one receives from going there for a day tour is trivial. All who enter carry radiation detectors and dosimeters as a precaution, and those are examined when one leaves the area. Upon departure, we learned that the radiation picked up that day was about a quarter of what one would get from spending two days in Denver, Colorado.