Pripyat is a town located in northern Ukraine, not far from the border with Belarus.
Its coordinates are 51° north latitude and 30° east longitude.
It is located about 110 m. above the sea level among the large plains of Ukraine.
To the north of the city runs the homonymous river of Pripyat.
The city is surrounded by abandoned farmland and wooded areas with deciduous forests.
The nature around the city is contaminated with radioactive materials, which was emitted during the accident at the nuclear power plant in April 1986.
Today no one can say with certainty how long will be polluted the environment in the vicinity.
Pripyat was built in 1970 in the manner in which have been occurred hundreds of cities in the former Soviet Union.
It was built to give shelter to the workers of the nuclear power plant “Lenin”.
The city looked like typical socialist town – prefabricated buildings, schools and kindergartens – everything has built as a template.
Buildings, from whose architecture is not expected anything else but the ability to accommodate as many inhabitants as it is possible.
Only 16 years later the population was forced to leave the contaminated area.
As the speakers announced in those fatal day, that had to be a temporary evacuation of the population.
This escape, however, never ends.
On the April 27, 1986 the town was deserted forever.
And this has nothing surprising – the town is situated just over one kilometer from the breakdown power.
About the damaged nuclear reactors there are two restricted zones – 30 km zone in which is forbidden for living and for the developing of agriculture and 10 km zone, where the access is strictly limited – this is the so-called zone of very dangerous level of radiation.
The 10 and 30 km zones are not random – this is a standard that is always strictly observed in the event of a nuclear accident.
For agriculture in the 10 km zone, of course, would be craziness to speak!
There is checkpoint control which restricts the entry in the ten-kilometer zone.
Indeed, for the human being is difficult to imagine how it looks in fact a real deserted city.
City that is completely dead.
City, in which through the broken windows of the ruined buildings, grow trees and continue to ruin the rotten panels and rusty metal structures of the former residential blocks and public buildings.
From the old streets is remained only the shadow.
The asphalt is a burst and through the cracks grow trees, shrubs and grass, which are also contaminated by the radiation.
Abandoned playgrounds, carousels, cars, buses, trucks and everything that can run through the person’s mind, creates one of the most heartbreaking and dramatic view that show you the colossal scale of the human suffering in Pripyat and dozens of ghost towns and villages in the vicinity.
After the incident the radiation has begun to spread rapidly.
It is alleged that after the accident have detected elevated levels of radioactivity, even in New Zealand, which lies halfway around the world!
The Chernobyl accident is the largest nuclear disaster, which happened in the history of the mankind for all time and it has changed the opinion of millions of people worldwide about the future of the nuclear energy.
Today, decades after the accident some people have turned tragedy into a business.
Sometimes people insert into the abandoned town because to steal construction materials from the derelict buildings and then they sale the contaminated building material to other people, who build with them their new homes!
The consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident are devastating.
Years after the nuclear disaster in the families of people that have lived in the town of Pripyat before the accident and its surrounding areas continue to have babies with birth defects as a result of the increased levels of radiation.
The accident in the power plant of Pripyat is considered to be the last nail in the coffin of the Soviet regime.
The amounts intended for decontamination of the area has reached colossal proportions and nobody knows how long will last the consequences and even if it will be ever completely erased.
Currently, the breakdown power around Pripyat is covered by a sarcophagus because to prevent the further leakage of radiation.
Shocking, but the enormous scale of the tragedy succeeded to arouse the curiosity and the tourist interest and today specially equipped groups of tourists with buses travel and enter into the prohibited zone.
This type of tourism, although it seems a bit perverse, however, shows the reality to the people and help them to gain an idea about the seriousness of what happened.
About 4-5000 people a year take on the tourist route, but for the visitors there is always a risk to take even if small doses of the radiation from the emitted during the accident strontium-90 and cesium-137.
When approaches the affected areas from far away man can see the plates with a sign of dangerous from radiation.
Pripyat is a museum and monument of the horror under the open skies.
The city shows the scale to which it can reach the destructiveness and human stupidity.
We can only hope that something like this will never happens again! In the tragedy directly affected are hundreds of people and indirect victims are about 7 million inhabitants of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia!
If the USSR had not taken urgent steps to render safe the damaged reactor of the power plant, today Europe could seems like the city of Pripyat.
The region of Chernobyl is likely to remain infected between 40 and 50 thousand years!