Pripyat Ukraine, Official Population "0"

Today is the day, well actually 2 days from now, the town of Priypat, Ukraine went from 50,000 or so to zero.  Everybody out. Today, however, it was if 1,000 Hiroshima bombs polluted that part of the world.



Looking out someone's apartment window
Pripyat, Ukraine



I was in Stockholm, on Vahallavagen Strs., Apartment 203 when my Swedish was tested to the limit as Radio Sweden announced that radiation was found on the uniforms of all those working outside the big Swedish reactor at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant, some 700 miles from Pripyat, and what was found registered way over the limit.  No news from Ukraine or the USSR at that point. Nothing. Silence. Just 50,000 people rounded up and moved out.

There are a lot of photos on Chernobyl circulating today.  I saw the plant about a month after; actually was taken on a "tour" of the area as part of a little scientific delegation visiting Kiev.

"It is absolutely safe or we wouldn't be going there". 

Absolutely, I say with 100% certainty. People are still dying from cancer in the grass/milk/ground chain in Sweden 27 years later, but Pripyat, no problem. Everyone there is healthy. Population 0.

No sense in re-telling an oft told tale but this happened because of some really bad decisions and not following some basic rules. Toss in a load of human error and voila.

I think they took just about everything of value.

There have been a few documentaries about this mess; a mess I might add that will be be someone else's problem 100 years from now and ten generations after that. I don't have dosimeter from my first visit but it was off the charts after half an hour and it was announced that we had to return to Kiev for a special meeting. I insisted we drive through Pripyat on the way out.  It was a bit out of the way. The town was clean of people as if vaporized.  Stuff was just up and left..balconies with plants and wash hanging, dogs in the street, actually pretty normal except for no people.

In the years since, most everything of value has been stripped clean. Some families remain on the outskirts of the area but not many. They are goners anyway as the radiation/cancer linkage is a matter of when not if.

It would be nice if someone invented some way to boil water that didn't have this risk.  I'll give you til nightfall.