Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

I stared. Mushrooms, because they collect and concentrate the radionuclides in the soil, are supposed to be the last thing you should eat in the affected area. And Dennis gathered them in the heart of the Exclusion Zone.

“You collect mushrooms? And you eat them?” There was awe in my voice.

“Yes, this is clean area, I know. This is no problem.”

I couldn’t believe my luck. A total newbie, I was already teamed up with a guy who used the zone as his own mushroom patch and trout stream. I wanted to abandon our itinerary. Who needs to see a destroyed nuclear reactor when you can go fishing just downriver?

Don’t think I didn’t beg. But Dennis was far too professional to chuck the official program—with all its approved paperwork, stamped and signed in duplicate for each checkpoint—just because some half-witted foreigner said pretty please. But this time, there was a moment’s hesitation. “This is, um. Not possible,” he said, getting back on script. But I saw the hint of a smile on his face as he turned away from the map.

The briefing continued down the side wall of the room, from one diagram to the next. There were a pair of maps showing the distribution of contamination by radioactive isotopes of cesium and strontium in the zone. The contamination is wildly uneven, depending on where the radioactive debris fell immediately after the explosion, and on the wind and rain in the days and weeks that followed, when the open reactor core was spewing a steady stream of radioactive smoke and particles into the air. The weather of those following weeks is inscribed on the ground, in contamination. The maps showed the distribution, color-coded in shades of red and brown, a misshapen starfish with its heart anchored over the reactor.

The radiation level at any given spot also varies over time, although based on what, I’m not quite sure. So there are limits set for what is considered normal, just as there are in any city. Dennis told me that the standard in the town of Chernobyl was 80 microroentgens per hour. In Kiev, it was 50. (It’s about the same in New York, where background radiation alone gets you about 40 micros per hour.)

“In the last month, I measured 75 micros at different places in the town,” he said. Chernobyl was pushing the limit. But I was unclear what the standards for radiation levels really meant. In Kiev, for example, what difference did it make that the standard was 50 micros instead of 80, or 100?

“It means,” said Dennis, “there would be panic in Kiev if the reading was 51.” He thought people in Kiev were a little paranoid about contamination. “Just yesterday, some journalists called, saying they had heard there was a release of radioactive dust at the reactor,” he said. “I told them I had just been down to the reactor, and there was no problem.”

We had come to the end of the briefing. Dennis paused in front of the last photograph, which showed a large outdoor sculpture. Two angular gray columns held a slender crucifix aloft, like a pair of gigantic tweezers holding a diamond up for inspection. Below them, half a dozen life-size figures lugged fire hoses and Geiger counters toward a replica of the reactor’s cooling tower.

It was the firemen’s memorial. In the hours immediately following the explosion, the firemen of Pripyat had responded to the fire that still burned in the reactor building, and had kept it from spreading to the adjacent reactor. Unaware at first that the core had even been breached, they received appalling doses of radiation and began dying within days.

Dennis turned to me, expressionless behind his shades. The giant pointer tapped gently on the photo of the memorial. “If not for those firemen,” he said, “we would have an eight-hundred-kilometer zone, instead of thirty.”

Nikolai was waiting in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette. “We work until five o’clock,” Dennis said. “So we’ll have lunch at half past four. Then at ten to five is football. It is the most important game.” He was talking about the World Cup. Ukraine’s soccer team had qualified for the first time, and tonight was the critical elimination match against Tunisia. Fanciful images of a raucous Chernobyl sports bar danced through my mind. I told Dennis it sounded like a great plan.

He rode shotgun, while I sat in back. A few hundred yards beyond the firemen’s memorial, Nikolai pulled into a small gravel parking lot and jumped out of the car to buy a bottle of beer and an ice cream bar. There was a convenience store in the zone.

Within a few minutes we reached the checkpoint for the ten-kilometer limit, which encompasses the most-contaminated areas. The car barely stopped as Dennis handed a sheet of paperwork through the window to the waiting guard. He folded the rest of our permission slips and tucked them into the car’s sun visor for later.

The air that streamed through the car’s open windows was warm and sweet, a valentine from the verdant countryside that surrounded us. It felt as though we were just three guys out for a pleasant drive in the country—which was more or less the truth. Dennis and Nikolai traded jokes and gossip in Russkrainian. “We’re talking about the other guide,” said Dennis. “He’s on vacation.” It seemed there were no more than a handful of Chernobylinterinform guides. It only added to the sense that I had found a traveler’s dream: an entire region that—although badly contaminated—was beautiful, interesting, and as yet unmolested by hordes of other visitors.

My thoughts were interrupted by a loud electronic beep. My radiation detector had turned itself on—funny, that—and now that there was actually some radiation to detect (a still-modest 30 micros), it had begun to speak out with an annoying, electric bleat that in no way matched the PADEKC’s smooth iPod-from-Moscow look. There was a reason, I now realized, that this detector looked like something you might take to the gym instead of to a nuclear accident site: It was designed for the anxious pockets of people who thought 30 micros were worth worrying about.

In the front seat, Dennis had produced his own detector, a brick-size box of tan plastic fronted by a metal faceplate. Little black switches and cryptic symbols in Cyrillic and Greek adorned its surface. I was jealous. It seemed there was no kind of radiation it couldn’t detect, and it probably got shortwave radio, too. Its design was the height of gamma chic: slightly clunky, industrially built, understatedly cryptic, and pleasingly retro. What really sold me was its beep. Unlike the fretful blurts of the PADEKC, the beeps of this pro model were restrained, almost musical. It sounded like a cricket, vigilantly noting for the record that you were currently under the bombardment of this many beta particles, or that many gamma rays. It was a detector made for someone who accepts some radiation as a fact of daily life, and who doesn’t want to lose focus by being reminded of it too loudly. Someone who is perhaps even something of a connoisseur of radiation levels. Someone like Dennis.

The car stopped. Dennis pointed out the window to a large mound among the trees. “This is Kolachi,” he said. A pair of metal warning signs stood crookedly in the tall grass. That was all that remained. The village had been so contaminated by the accident that it was not only evacuated but also leveled and buried. There were many such villages. Dennis held his meter out the window: 56 micros. It was my first time above Kiev-panic levels.

Leaving Kolachi behind us, we passed by some old high-tension electrical wires—presumably part of the system that had, until recently, carried electricity from the undamaged reactors of the Chernobyl complex, which had continued to function even after the accident. The Soviet and then Ukrainian governments kept the other three reactors running into the 1990s, and only shut the last one down in 2000. Of the thousands of people still reporting to work in the Exclusion Zone, the great majority are employed in the decommissioning of those reactors.