Yarn 17 | Chernobyl
Podcast episode transcript below:
Before we begin. Have a listen to this…
(Sound clip)
This is a recording of sound echoing around the inside of an empty nuclear power plant cooling tower. You’d recognise the massive tulip shaped concrete structures with water vapour drifting up out of their open tops. Images of the cooling towers has become synonymous with nuclear power plants.
I thought they looked scary. Now I’m standing inside one, listening to my footsteps and other peoples voices reverberate around the circular walls towering over me. But this cooling tower is empty and unfinished. It’s only about 70% of its intended height. 4 tiers of Scaffolding run around the rim at the top, where workers once stood and laid layer upon layer of concrete slabs as if they were assembling a giant 3D puzzle.
A block hasn’t been laid here in 33 years and won’t be, ever again. Construction ceased all of a sudden over 30 years ago. Specifically, April 26 1986. The day of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which occurred when the reactor in unit number 4 exploded. This resulted in the biggest release of deadly radioactive particles the world has ever known. This happened half a mile from where I’m standing.
With this in mind, the echoes I’m hearing take on a haunting significance. And so does the sound of my Geiger counter as it beeps sporadically as I walk around the base of the tower.
It’s October 2019 and I’m visiting the Chernobyl exclusion zone in the Ukraine. I’ll spend two days exploring the zone with a small group of tourists and a guide and I’ll stay overnight inside the exclusion zone, in Chernobyl’s only functioning hotel.
This year The Exclusion zone has received a surge in visitors following the popular HBO TV drama series starring Jared Harris. I highy recommend watching it. That series took an in-depth look into what exactly happened the night of the disaster and the immediate aftermath. In this podcast we will focus much more on the zone as it is today, its most intriguing sites and its recently declassified secret origins.
So come with me as we explore what was once, the most dangerous place on earth.
(intro music cue)
This episode is in eight parts.
Part 1. The zone
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is actually two exclusion zones. The 30 Kilometer zone and the 10 kilometer zone, with a combined area roughly the size of Luxembourg.
The first one you enter is the 30 kilometer zone. It’s located 2 hours drive north of Kiev the Ukrainian capital but it also spreads across the Ukraine border into the neighboring state of Belarus. There’s only one entrance open to the public into the 30 kilo zone and that’s in Ukraine. Passport checks are performed by Ukraininan military guards before you are allowed to proceed past the barrier. Anyone who enters the zone is issued with a small radiation measurement device that is to be worn around your neck until you exit the zone again, when your total exposure is measured. I’ll come back to that later.
Our guide congratulates us all on our recently acquired qualifications. The moment we crossed the border we all became research scientists. Officially the exclusion zone can only be accessed by military personnel, plant workers and scientists. Tour groups get around this rule by calling themselves research trips. Our guide assures us that no one is going to ask to see our science degrees.
Like in the old soviet times, a lot of the rules in the Ukraine are open for negotiation. There are rules that can be bent and rules that can’t. You just need to know which is which.
This is our guide (Beep).
(audio clip Tour Guide audio)
He’s asked me not to mention his name or that of his company for the following reason.
This year the Ukraine government issued a new law stating that visitors to the zone were no longer allowed to enter inside any unsecured buildings on the site. The structures are, after all unmaintained and falling down. Roofs are caving in, floorboards are rotting and trees are bursting through walls. Nature is taking back control.
But “it’s ok.” Our guide says. “I’m not interested in suicide so we’ll be careful.”
The entrance ban is also a measure to stop looting. As more and more tourists visit the site, little my little, items are being taken away. People don’t seem to mind that anything they take out of the zone and place on their mantel piece might be covered in harmful radioactive particles.
Tour guides have been issued with GPS units so their movements can be tracked. If they are caught going inside any buildings, they could lose their permits. So our guide’s solution is to leave his tracker outside if we enter any buildings and when we are inside, we are to keep our noise levels to a minimum so we don’t attract any patrolling guards.
With the 30 kilo exclusion zone checkpoint cleared we head on to the town of Chernobyl.
A long straight road stretches out before us empty except for the odd tour bus or military vehicle passing against us. Dense forest lines either side of the road.
Part 2. Radiation
But before we get to the town of Chernobyl, now is a good time to explain a little about radiation levels. Put very simply radiation is energy. Everything emits radiation. Tiny particles that radiate off objects as they decay. There are three main types of radiation particles, Alpha, Beta and Gamma particles. Gamma radiation is the most harmful. They are the smallest and fastest moving particles. Unlike Beta particles, which can be stopped by heavy elements like lead, Gamma particles can penetrate almost anything. They can pass through human flesh and bone and actually break apart our DNA or mutate our cells and cause cancer.
The Geiger counter I’m carrying detects levels of Gamma radiation. It’s measured in something called micro Sieverts or mSVs. When we started out in the city of Kiev, two hours from the exclusion zone my meter read 0.15 msvs. Anything below 0.3 msvs is considered normal. The display lights up as green and short friendly beeps interspaced by long intervals can be heard.
As we drive along the road, 5 then 10 kilometers deep into the 30 kilo zone my meter reads 0.12. Lower than what it was in Kiev. So why is this?
Have you ever looked out an airplane window at night as you come in to land in a big city? Street lamps light up the outlines of roads, carparks and housing estates leaving other areas are city in darkness — black.
Radiation levels in the zone are a little like this. The road we are traveling down was meticulously washed, parts of it may have been resurfaced. It contains very few radioactive particles but the thick forest on either side of the road contains a lot more radiation. In fact, we exit the bus for a moment and walk to the side of the road. As soon as I approach the tree line, my Geiger counter’s friendly interspersed beeps become one angry uninterrupted wine. The digits change from green to orange. At the edge of the road my meter reads 2.20, well above the normal 0.3 msvs. While the roads in the exclusion zone are perfectly safe the forest areas are, to this day, incredibly dangerous to humans.
The reason we can enter the exclusion zone at all is because of the incredible work done by the so called Liquidators. In the months and years directly after the disaster, an estimated 700,000 men and women undertook the massive job to stop the radiation from spreading, stop radiation entering the water supply or food chain and to pacify the fallout within the zone as must as possible.
Their names were never properly documented and their exact numbers are not known. Any deaths or illness that occurred as a result of their work were never properly documented either. Many were from the military. The liquidations came from all over the Soviet Union but most of them were from the Ukraine and Belarus. Our tour guide’s grandfather was a liquidator. A fact he’s very proud of. Our guide shows us his late grandfather’s original ID pass he used while working here in 1986. It’s a prized possession for him.
Once the powerplant itself was secured and the emission of radioactive particles was stopped, the titanic task of decontaminating the surrounding area began. Helicopters dropped liquid latex all over the site, to catch airborne particles and stick them to the ground. Then the top layer of soil from as many areas of the site as possible was dug up, removed and replaced with new topsoil or sand trucked in from outside the zone. Over a hundred small villages and settlements were razed and buried. Large swathes of forest were raised and buried. Larger buildings and structures were left standing but were washed and rewashed. Demolishing multistory buildings would have been a lot more work and the falling debris might kick up more particles into the air. And of course thousands of animals were killed and buried.
Everything was buried in the area that has become the Red Forest. All the contaminated soil was buried there, all the culled animals were buried there, all the vehicles and machines used in the clean-up were buried there. Along with the inside of unit number 4 of the power plant, the red forest remains one of the most contaminated areas of the zone.
So most of the high traffic areas of the zone have been cleaned but there are still black spots. Pockets of highly radioactive areas all around the zone. A stone that wasn’t washed, a piece of metal from a discarded vehicle part, slates on rooftops where water hoses couldn’t reach. They lie in wait like landmines ready to go off. But as long as the particles are not airborne, they will stay where they are and as long as you don’t get too close to these hot spots, for too long, you’ll be fine. Any particles that landed on the ground after the explosion, that weren’t removed by the liquidators have started to sink beneath the soil. Contaminated particles are thought to sink at a rate of 1 centimeter per year. So if you dig down thirty centimeters, that’s where you’ll find the original fallout. This is the main reason why the exclusion zone is not habitable, no homes can be built here, nothing can be grown here and the water cannot be drunk here.
Despite the liquidators best efforts some contaminated objects have found their way outside of the zone. After the great liquidation project was concluded a second unofficial and illegal project began. The looting of the exclusion zone. It was almost as large in scale as the liquidation. Anything of value that could be removed, was taken from the zone. Radiators, mattresses, floor tiles, cutlery and any metal. I’ll talk more about looting later but I mention it here because the main reason why I have my own personal Geiger counter with me today is an indirect result of the looting of Chernobyl.
In the late 80s, tons of Iron was taken from the zone. Security personnel were most likely paid bribes to look the other way as all this material was moved through their checkpoints. The Iron was resold and ended up being bought by building contractors. Several apartment blocks in Kiev ended up being built with contaminated steel girders. To this day some Ukrainians viewing apartments to buy or rent will give the place a once over with their personal Geiger counter just in case. A work colleague of mine is from the Ukraine, he loaned me his Geiger counter for my trip.
Part 3. Chernobyl town
Entering the town of Chernobyl, at first, I’m a little underwhelmed. The town seems pretty active. People are out walking the streets. It looks well maintained. There are lots of obviously vacant buildings but there are lots of others clearly still in use.
The town of Chernobyl has become the administrative centre of the zone. It contains two shops, a hotel, a church, a fire station and several dormitory buildings. Soldiers and staff stay in the dormitory buildings and rotate in and out of the zone, fifteen days on, fifteen days off. Over a thousand people bed down in the zone each night. This doesn’t include the current power plant workers. They stay outside the zone in a new purpose built town off limits to tourists.
The only restaurant is located in the modest Chernobyl hotel. Alcohol can only be purchased in the shop or restaurant between the hours of 7pm and 9pm. And there is a curfew of 11pm each night.
I’m traveling with my sister Debbie. Here she describes her experience when she entered the shop in the town.
(Debbie clip)
One of the most distinctive aspects of the town of Chernobyl is its water pipes system. Shiny metal pipes run alongside the road network, over the ground. At junctions the pipes crisscross the road and form arches up and over road entrances so cars can pass under them. A lot of visitors to Chernobyl think that the water pipe system was laid above ground after the disaster, to avoid the radiation beneath the ground but in fact they pre date the disaster. The town of Chernobyl is an ancient settlement, it dates back to the 1100’s. Much later, during the Soviet era when it came time to bring piped running water to the town, the soviets decided to do it the cheapest way they knew how — above the ground. Unbeknownst to them, this system provides a little more safety from the contaminated ground below. Although this water is still never used for drinking.
The main square in Chernobyl contains something unique to the rest of the Ukraine. It has the only surviving statue of Vladimir Lenin in the country. Statues of Lenin would have been present in most towns in the Soviet Union but after Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, its people pulled them all down, except of course for this one, which was out of reach in the exclusion zone. All Soviet iconography remains, stuck in time, within the zone.
Across the road from the Statue of Lenin is a small unassuming building. This was the location for the Chernobyl disaster inquest, where key figures in charge of the plant were put on trial and testimony was heard from scientists and investigators.
They choose to stage the trial in the town of Chernobyl, not for its proximity to the disaster site but for its seclusion and secure location, away from any prying international media or curious crowds.
Even though the Power plant is generally known by the name Chernobyl, the actual name of the plant is the Vladimir I. Lenin nuclear power plant. Chernobyl is not even the closest town to the plant. It’s 15 kilometers away, while the much larger city of Pripyat is only 2 kilometers from the plant. The city of Pripyat was purpose build to house plant workers and their families. It was named Pripyat after the river Pripyat that runs next to it. The city was only established in 1970. 16 years before the disaster. This is why the power station is known by the name Chernobyl –
the town of Chernobyl, although a lot smaller, was much better known locally for the simple reason thats it’s been there for over 800 years.
Part 4. The 10 kilometer zone
It’s time to leave Chernobyl town and enter the inner part of the exclusion zone. The 10 kilometer zone. Back on the deserted road, our way is blocked once again by a second check point. We file out of the bus and our passports are checked again. Friendly stray dogs mingle between us, looking for food and attention. There are stray dogs all over the site. They all look alike, a shaggy cross breed particular to the zone. These dogs are decendents of the original pets left behind after the evacuation. The ones that managed to evade being shot by the liquidators.
“These dogs are fine”, our guide says. “See, no radiation.” As he holds his Geiger counter next to one. “Safe to pet and safe to eat… I joke. We don’t eat dog in Ukraine…. Only cats.”
All dogs in the zone are tagged behind the ear. They congregate near check points and popular tourist sights. “These are the best fed dogs in the country. Tourists can’t resist giving them their leftover lunches.” Our guide says.
The soldiers are glad of the dogs company too. They teach them tricks and play with them on slow days. The three dogs that occupy this checkpoint have been dubbed Alpha, Beta and Gamma by the guards, after the three types of radiation. “Soldiers here have dark sense of humor” our guide says. “It comes with the job.”
Once we clear the 10 kilometer checkpoint, we start making our way towards the power plant. The forest to the right of the road starts the thin, then completely disappears. The sun hits my eyes. Flat black soil stretches out for acres. It looks completely desolate.
“This is not radiation.” Our guide says. “This forest fire. Chernobyl fire station still very busy in summer.”
Forest fires in the zone are common in the summer months. The remnants of the one I’m looking at was a result of a discarded cigarette thrown from a bus. Fires are inevitable in such a heavily forested area. Especially when you add humans into the mix.
“During this fire, half the zone was off limits, tourists were very disappointed. You’re lucky you’re not here in summer.”
Part 5. The power plant
The first evidence of the power plant comes in the form of another forest. A man made forest of steel and wire. Hundreds of electricity pilons and towers carry black cables through sub stations and transformers.
From above it would look like a vast network of train tracks converging into a busy station. Electricity once surged through this warren of cabling and faned out in all directions, linking towns and cities all around the country. Now the electricity trickles in the opposite direction, providing power to what remains of the plant.
We pull over by a lake where the whole power plant becomes visible.
To the left of the road are the Electricity pilons, they lead to the power plant complex directly in front of us. The complex is made up of buildings, 4, 3, 2 and 1. Unit 4 is easily identified by its massive domed encasing. The so called sarcophagus, it was completed in 2016 and funded by an international consortium of countries.
Units 3, 2 and 1 can each be distinguished by their red and white chimney stacks. To the right of the complex, a man made lake, with concrete banking, follow the road down to where I’m standing. Directly across the lake on my right, are the unfinished buildings of unit 5, and 6. A lonely crane hangs above the roofless structures. Beside them are the skeletal beginnings of unit 5 and 6’s cooling towers. Tower 1 is about 70 percent complete but tower 2 is only about 20 percent finished.
The lake was designed to cool the water coming from units 1 to 4 before it would be pumped back into the station. The water was heated again by the energy from the reactor, until it turned to steam, where it pushed a massive turbine that generated electricity. The steam then began to cool and turn back into water, where it would be flow back once again into the lake.
But the lake wasn’t big enough to service two additional units. The constant flow of heated water would never cool down enough to repeat the process. So each new unit would require its own cooling tower. Power stations also need a constant source of cold water so they can flood their reactor and cool it down if needed.
A cooling tower adds an extra step to the process. The warm water from the plant, that was previous steam, is pumped into the tower. There is an inner wall inside the tower. Hot water enters the bottom of the inner container and rises to the top as it cools, eventually spilling over the inner wall. The cooled water then runs into the lake where the process can start again. Excess water vapor is what you see trailing out the opening at the top of the tower. It’s not smoke, as some people might assume.
There were big plans for the future of the Chernobyl site. In addition to the new units 5 and 6 — A further 6 reactors were slated to be built, along with their required cooling towers. This of course was all scrapped in the Spring of 1986. But the remaining units at the Chernobyl plant kept on producing power for almost 10 years after the disaster.
Reactor №2 was permanently shut down in 1991 after a fire broke out due to a faulty switch in a turbine. Reactors №1 and 3 were eventually closed due to an agreement Ukraine made with the EU in 1995. But Chernobyl kept producing power right up until the year 2000.
Taking in the landscape around me and watching as my group pose for photos with the plant behind them, it’s the first time I feel a little weird. How should you look in these photos? Is smiling disrespectful in light of what happened here? Is it inappropriate to be in a photo at all?
Our guide rationalizes it in this way.
“Sure it’s sad. It can be a sad place. But we come here to honor the workers who lived here and the liquidators who make this place safe again. So I think it ok to bring life back to this place, smile and laugh. It up to you, everyone different.”
We move on and enter the power plant complex itself. Empty car parks surround the buildings but there are signs of life. At shift change plant workers wait for buses to collect them. The buses are the same soviet models that evacuated all the residents of Pripyat 33 years ago. This scene of workers, smoking cigarettes and joking with each other while they board the buses is like viewing a snapshot from history.
We pull up about 200 meters away from Unit number four. It’s great silver arched cover glistens in the sun. You could fit the statue of liberty inside the center of the arch, with a few meters to spare. My Geiger counter begins to beep. 2.0, 2.3, 3.4 msv appears on the display in red. That’s nothing compared to what the reading would be under the cover.
I’m standing on the spot where the first fire fighters to respond that night began tackling a blaze like no other they’ve ever fought. None of them would be alive a month later.
(pause for music)
Part 6. Welcome to Pripyat
Our next stop is the city of Pripyat, two kilometers away. We cross over the railway bridge, which has become known as the bridge of death. The story goes that on the night of the disaster, residents of Pripyat gathered on the bridge to watch the fire at the plant and the strange glow shining up into the sky. All these spectators are said to have died soon after.
But our guide remarks that this doesn’t make sense to him.
“If you lived in Pripyat, why would walk outside the city, in the middle of the night? Why not go to the roof of your apartment building? That would be a better view.”
Standing at center of the bridge, our guide points over to Unit 4’s dome in the distance. It’s barely visible above the tree line.
“You see, the sarcophagus makes it even taller than the original building was, but you can still only see the very top. There isn’t enough elevation here.”
He heard the bridge’s nickname predates the disaster. There was a bad road accident here that resulted in deaths. That’s when the bridge got its name.
We near our third checkpoint at the entrance into Pripyat. It’s the most lax, a guard leans back in a chair and just waves us on. There’s been a checkpoint in this spot since before the disaster. There’s been a checkpoint into this city since its establishment. Pripyat was a private community of over 40,000 inhabitants. If you wanted to visit friends or family who lived here, you needed to apply for a permit.
It’s only when you enter Pripyat that you realize the scale and speed at which nature can resume dominance in the absence of human intervention. In the 33 years since its desertion, Pripyat’s streets, parks and squares have become completely overgrown with trees. The level of forestation surprises me. Its how’d I’ve expect to find a lost ancient Inca city, not a place so recently inhabited. Our guide says we’re lucky to be here in Autumn, while the leaves are thinning. At the height of summer, the vegetation is so thick it’s hard to make out the buildings so it’s easy to get lost.
We make a stop at Pripyat’s police station. A police officer posted to Pripyat would have had a relatively uneventful time of it until April 1986. There was virtually no reported crime in the city’s 14 year history. The jail was used to dry out the occasional drunk. There was 1 recorded murder. A man died from a stabbing sustained during a drunken knife fight.
The Fire station next door was a similarly easy posting for the fire fighters until the night of the disaster.
We move on to the swimming pool complex, which actually remained in use after the disaster
(Tour Guide audio clip)
Then on to a school
(Tour Guide audio clip)
Pripyat was a model city for the Soviet Union. The reason there are some may pictures of it was because they were taken officially for propaganda purposes. It was build using the best methods and materials. The architectural and interior designs far surpassed anything you’d find in the average Soviet town or city at the time.
The elementary school we’re in is a beautiful design. It’s made up of two inter connected, 4 story buildings with a courtyard at the centre of each. It features a double height gym, where the upper level hallway gives passers by a view down into the space. On each floor a wide hallway runs around the entire level lined with an unbroken ribbon of windows that look out into the courtyard.
As we enter the cafeteria our guide points to a heap of gas masks on the floor.
(clip Tour Guide audio)
Tourists have staged this scene. This is something we begin to see in more of the rooms and buildings we visit. Gas masks keep popping up- even though they were never used by the people of Pripyat. Clocks are suspiciously stopped at the time of the disaster — even though the explosion would have had no effect on clocks and children’s dolls are placed in cliched tableaus on beds next to.. yes… more gas masks. All in the name of a good photo.
We move on to Pripyat hospital. The hospital’s basement is one of the most contaminated parts of the zone. The clothing worn by the first response fire fighters was left here in a pile and here they lie, to this day- A few floors below where I’m standing.
Some of the inner corridors are so dark, I have to turn on my phone’s flash light. I see a collection of flashlights coming towards us. Another group of tourists. It’s a very odd feeling, seeing someone else in the zone. You think, what are they doing here? But they’re just doing the same as you.
Our two groups file past each other in silence. It’s like we’d rather not acknowledge each other’s presence. The charade is broken for a moment, you feel cheap and exploitive. We’re all treating this place like a theme park. Once the other group is out of sight and earshot we can go back to pretending we’re the only ones here.
The insatiable appetite of thrill seekers and zone obsessives to find undiscovered areas or to perform dare devil acts atop well-known structures and post them on you tube has become a worrying trend. Our guide calls them illegals or stalkers. He must be a Tarkovsky fan. They enter through the surrounding forest. Most head to Pripyat and hide out in one of the 100 or so apartment blocks for days or weeks. From their they have free reign of the zone. The fine for getting caught is less than the price of a ticket, although I imagine you might have to fork out a little more if you don’t want your camera destroyed by a guard.
The sun is starting to set and a fog drifts in as were pass through the main square of the city. A yellow sky provides the backdrop to the infamous Ferris wheel. The centre piece of the amusement park scheduled to open for Pripyat’s May day celebrations 4 days after the disaster.
But all the inhabitants of Pripyat were gone by then. They were issued and evacuation notice 36 hours after the explosion. Our bus drives out of Pripyat along the same route they would have taken.
(clip of broadcast notice in Russian)
This notice was broadcast;
Attention. Attention. Attention.
Residents of Pripyat!
The City Council informs you that due to the accident at Chernobyl Power Station, radioactive conditions in the vicinity of Pripyat are deteriorating.
The Communist Party, its officials and the armed forces are taking necessary steps to combat this.
Nevertheless, with the view to keep people as safe and healthy as possible, the children being top priority, we need to temporarily evacuate the citizens in the nearest towns of Kiev region.
It is highly advisable to take your documents, some vital personal belongings and a certain amount of food with you. The senior executives of public and industrial facilities of the city has decided on the list of employees needed to stay in Pripyat to maintain these facilities in a good working order. All the houses will be guarded by the police during the evacuation period.
Comrades, you are only leaving your residences temporarily. Please make sure you have turned off the lights, electrical equipment shut the windows. Please keep calm during this short-term evacuation.
We cross the bridge of death and descend to the train tracks passing underneath. The area’s train station is just a short walk along the tracks. It’s become a train graveyard. Here lies another radiation hot spot. Our guide attaches his Geiger counter to a selfie stick and angles his device under a rusting excavation machine’s caterpillar track:
(clip Tour Guide audio)
It’s well past night fall when we arrive at the Chernobyl hotel, back in the 30 kilometer zone. The dinner menu is pretty simple. The dishes are called Chicken or vegetarian. I settle in with others from our group and conversation veers away from Chernobyl for a couple of hours.
(clip dinner)
I retire to bed. It’s quiet, except for the odd howling from the zone dogs outside in the carpark.
(clip dogs)
Part 7. The beginning
The next morning we venture back into the 10 kilometer zone on a journey to the most important area on the site. We’ll go back to the very beginning and uncover the reason for the power plant’s existence in the first place.
We’re on the way to a former secret Soviet military base, called Chernobyl One. Like Pripyat, Chernobyl One was a custom built private city. But unlike Pripyat, it never appeared on any maps and visitors were strictly forbidden. There were no photographs taken of this city.
Chernobyl one is only a few kilometers from Pripyat. We turn off the main road at an unmarked junction and travel uphill along a smaller B road. There’s thick forest on either side of us. The road is surfaced using slabs of poured concrete. After 30 years, the gaps between the slabs have widened and the concrete has cracked. It’s a rough ride.
We slow down for a moment as we pass a sheltered bus stop. Its back wall is painted with a colorful mural of a cartoon bear. Micha, the Moscow 1980 Olympic mascot. The Olympics of 1980 and 1984 were charged with cold war political symbolism. They showed a world split in two. The 1980 games were held in the Second world, where communism ruled. The US boycotted the games along the 65 other countries. The reason they gave was because of the Soviet-Afghan war.
Then the 1984 games were held in Los Angeles, the First world, where capitalism was king. The Soviets boycotted that year.
The image of the friendly cartoon bear is a poignant relic of the Cold War. We’re about to discover how the Cold War is reason we’re here. It’s the reason the plant was built and thus the reason why this place is now a no go zone. But I’m getting slightly ahead of myself.
The bus stop. The friendly looking bus stop is a fake. It was built with the intention of never being used. It was a front, erected to make this otherwise curios road to nowhere appear a little more normal.
The citizens of Priyat and the surrounding villages were told that the road lead to a children’s summer camp. No one from the area had ever sent their kids there, no one had even heard of anybody else’s kids going there but our guide explains it like this:
“In old Soviet Union the saying goes-
The less you know, the sounder you sleep.”
Our guide did hear a story first hand from a former resident of Pripyat, who was curious-
(clip Tour Guide audio)
We finally reach the top of the hill. The trees part and we get our first look at Duga 1. The secret structure at the center of this base.
Duga 1 is a colossal radio antenna array. A wall of Iron, it stretches out across the landscape like a giant’s tennis net. Its intricate lattice structure is over 150 meters tall at its highest point.
To put that into perspective, the Statue of liberty stands 93 meters tall and the London Eye is 135 meters tall. Duga 1 is taller than both of them.
Duga 1 spans 770 meters in length. That’s roughly 7 soccer fields. It takes about 8 minutes to walk from one end of the structure to the other.
How do you keep a structure that size secret?
You put it in the middle of a forest. The residents in the small villages couldn’t see up higher that the trees around them. Pripyat was different of course. Residents living above the 7th floor of any of the apartment blocks could see the radio antenna clearly as its shiny Iron construction glistened in the sun. They were told it was just an FM radio antenna, so they could hear their favorite soviet radio shows better.
The less you know…
What was it really for?
It was intended to be a ballistic missile early detection system.
Duga 1 was part of a radar array. Duga 2 and 3 are several kilometers away in opposite directions. Duga 2 and 3 are a lot smaller, they were transmitters while Duga 1 was the receiver.
The Duga project was an over the horizon radar system. The curvature of the earth means that most radar is limited to the distance of the horizon but Duga fires radio waves up at an angle into the air. The signal bounces off the Earth’s surrounding ionosphere and back down again in the direction of North America. The assumption being that if the US launched a nuclear missile at the Soviet Union, they would take the shortest route possible over the arctic circle.
Intercontinental missiles leave earth’s atmosphere on their way up and break through the atmosphere again on their way down. Duga 1, the receiver, would detect a disturbance in the signal being bounced back to it at the two points when the atmosphere has been breached by the incoming missile. The name Duga is a shortened version of the Russian word Raduga, meaning Rainbow. An apt name for a radar system that curves around the sky like a rainbow.
For the system to work an extremely powerful radio signal had to be constantly fired up into ionosphere. The signal was so powerful that it interrupted frequencies all around the world.
It could be heard over Air traffic control radio, VHF emergency frequencies and AM and FM radio stations. Heres what it sounded like:
(audio clip of Russian woodpecker)
The Americans assumed it was coming from the Soviet Union but Moscow just denied it. The irritating sound was dubbed the Russian Helicopter by the British while the Americans called it the Russian Woodpecker. No one knew what it was for. Some guessed it was some kind of missile defense system while others thought it was a tool for Communist mind control. The Soviets didn’t care what people thought it was, as long as it struck fear into the heart of capitalists it was fine by them. Its presence was also a constant reminder to the Americans of apparent Soviet technical dominance.
The Soviets picked the region of Chernobyl for the Duga system because of its remoteness and its line of site to the north america. But they had a bit of a problem. A radar station that big would require a massive amount of energy…
It needed its own power plant….
This is the reason the Chernobyl power plant was originally proposed and built. The radar station was the beginning of it all.
Without the radar station there would be no Power Plant.
There would be no Pripyat.
There would be no disaster and there would be no exclusion zone.
That makes this the most important place in the zone.
The Chernobyl power plant had 4 working reactors. Reactor number 1 provided power directly to the Duga array. A quarter of the plant’s total output.
From here the numbers start to get ridiculous. The Chernobyl power plant was built at a cost of 3 billion US dollars. An astronomical amount of money at the time. The Duga array was estimated to cost 7 billion US dollars. The two projects together cost almost half of what the US spent on the Apollo Moon program. That’s the price the Soviets were willing to pay for a 10 minute warning of an imminent nuclear attack.
The tragedy was, no matter how hard soviet scientists and engineers tried -
The Duga early warning system never worked!
They were not able to narrow the signal enough to get a reliable warning response. Commercial air traffic, weather balloons even large flocks of migrating birds all bounced back to Duga as an alarm. The system was useless.
But there was no need to let the world know this, so the soviets kept broadcasting the signal, they kept the base operational and they kept drawing massive amounts of electricity from the power plant.
The cold war was like a massive game of poker between the US and the Soviets. Making Duga the Soviets biggest bluff of the game.
Duga was finally turned off shortly after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. The woodpecker signal stopped broadcasting. The soviets finally had an excuse to scrap the programme without anyone knowing it never worked.
The military base Chernobyl 1 was evacuated 10 hours after the explosion. The city of Pripyat, which lies you 2 kilometers from the reactor was evacuated 36 hours after the explosion. And the hundred or so villages dotted around the zone weren’t fully evacuated until months after the explosion. Our guide sums this up with the phrase:
“Everyone was equal in the old Soviet Union. But some people were more equal than others.”
He’s a George Orwell fan too, I take it.
As I stand gazing up at this immense but ultimately pointless endeavor of paranoia, the most tragic of ironies hits me. In the Soviets’ attempt to protect its people from a nuclear explosion, by building this station — their actions actually lead to the very thing they fear most. A nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986, when Reactor number 4 exploded.
Part 8. The future.
As we leave the zone I can’t help thinking about its future. What will the zone be like in another 33 years? As nature continues its fight to eradicate any remnants of human existence here. The buidings in Pripyat will eventually fall down. If tourists and stalkers are continued to be allowed free reign across the site and looting, graffiti and staging continues, there wont be much left of the place either.
Decisions will have to be made about the future of the Exclusion zone. Weather that’s preserving it in some way or increasing security or restricting access or just letting nature erase it.
Half of the price of a ticket to the zone goes to the government. These funds supposedly go to the protection of the zone but with Ukraine being considered one of the most corrupt counties in the world, locals don’t exactly trust that the zone’s future is in safe hands.
I clear the final checkpoint out of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. I hand in the radiation meter that’s been hanging around my neck for the last 48 hours. I’m a little nervous as I wait for the results. Our guide reads out the amounts we’ve each absorbed.
Mine is a total of 6.6 msvs over two days. That’s roughly the equivalent of what you receive on an airplane during a two and a half hour flight.
This has been a story for www.yarnpodcast.com
Written and narrated by John Roche.
Music score by Drembot.
Very special thanks you my guide in the zone. If you’d like his name and the name of his tour group send me and email or twitter direct message. Details are in the episode description.
