Chernobyl: A Tour of Ground Zero

The abandoned city of Pripyat in winter. Picture from SAM Travel Ukraine.

In the first part of this article, I briefly detailed the history of the Chernobyl disaster, the worst nuclear accident in history. Hundreds of thousands were affected, tens of thousands killed, and an entire city evacuated and abandoned. Today, the only life and economy that has returned the area, besides the workers involved in the ongoing cleanup, is a small, rugged tourist industry that takes the curious into what had been ground zero.  

I took a tour of Chernobyl through a company called SoloEast. Before booking, I had read it was a good idea to check around as prices can vary (at least partly depending on the size of the group). Besides SoloEast, I contacted New Logic, Sam and the Ukranian Hostel Association asking to join a group.

SoloEast was the first to respond – quoting me $185 for a group tour in which I would be joining ten other people. A few days later I got a response from New Logic, but they didn't give me a price quote because they were aware I had already received a quote from SoloEast, who are apparently connected with them. If you want to get several price quotes, I'd recommend that you contact different agencies using different email addresses and names.

There are several restrictions and many precautions set up on the tour. Those attending must be at least 18 years old, and you must bring your passport. You cannot wear shorts, open-toed shoes, or tank tops. Those that are not properly dressed are left behind.

Taking photos and video is allowed almost everywhere, except of checkpoints, security devices (including any fences) and certain areas specified by the guide.

Altogether the tour takes about nine hours (including travel time), and involves a lot less walking than I anticipated – we were in the bus most of the time. We met in Independence Square in downtown Kiev at 8:45 am. We were bussed to Chernobyl, about eighty miles away. The bus was equipped with televisions on which they showed a documentary film about the incident and its aftermath. The video is quite informative – so if you've skipped part one of this article, you can still be well-informed for the tour once you get there.

An abandoned classroom in Pripyat, near Chernobyl. While it looks ransacked, this is what happens to man-made things when man is not around to maintain them.

We reached the first checkpoint and piled out of the bus. One by one, they took our passports, checked their lists to make sure we were on it, and scrutinized our passport photos and faces as fat bees buzzed around our heads.

We got back in the bus and headed for ChernobylInterInform, a state-run agency founded to encourage the study of the area and incident and which also helps coordinate tours. At InterInform we were introduced to our guide, Vladimir. Vladimir, one of 130,000 nuclear refugees after the accident at Chernobyl, now works for the agency. He spoke in Russian and an interpreter translated. He told us about the accident, eagerly answered our questions, and showed us pictures that were taken of Chernobyl and the surrounding areas in the days and years following the disaster.

One picture that was particularly memorable showed an enormous junkyard with vehicles piled on top of each other. Some 1,500 vehicles, used as clean-up tools after the accident, were contaminated and hence dangerous, and most of them are still out in the open and not properly stored to this day. We were told we wouldn't be visiting any of the areas where service vehicles were located or buried. However, if you're interested in that, there's a special tour that focuses on the clean-up after the catastrophe.

Vladimir, our guide, told us that today workers who are participating in the clean-up work twenty minutes a day and earn a full-time salary. They are closely monitored to measure how much exposure they receive each time, and can only work until they reach a certain limit. Then, they must find new careers.

We signed a form that explained the rules (no wandering off from the tour guide, no picking stuff up or taking anything out of the area, no taking pictures in areas the guide specifies as a no-photo zone, etc.). There was also a release-from-liability section that stated that if this tour should in any way have any negative affect upon your health, you will in no way hold anyone other than yourself responsible. Everyone in the group signed and on that note, we set off for Reactor No. 4, where the explosion took place.

The guide, Vladimir, holds a detector over an exceptionally radioactive patch of ground.

Our guide had a radiation detector, and he held it up during the bus ride, so we knew when radioactivity was rising or falling. On the way to Reactor No. 4, we passed large fields and some forests. The fields intermittently had bright yellow signs sticking out of the ground, which showed where radioactive material had been buried so that future generations can eventually move the material to safer storage. We passed a wide, empty patch where there had once been trees, which had burned down not from fire, but from radiation.

We stopped along the road and got out of the minivan to look at a construction site. Reactors 5 and 6 had been begun but never finished and the bulldozers, material, and partially-constructed reactors had been left as they had been in 1986. We were told not to step off the road into the grass as this was an "unclean" (contaminated) area. Vladimir told us that the road we were on had been cleaned hundreds of times but becomes contaminated again because of the surroundings. The body of water ahead of us was highly contaminated. Thankfully, it's still water that does not flow to other areas. We were told that there was a water supply underneath Reactor No. 4, and if the concrete separating the radioactive material from the water broke, it would have contaminated Ukraine's entire water supply. Thankfully that didn't – and hasn't – happened.  Vladimir told us to stomp our feet – but not wipe them on the ground – for 15-30 seconds before getting back into the van.

We got out of the vehicle again, only 109 yards away from Reactor No. 4. We were given instructions not to photograph any part of the reactor that showed fence, entrance or exit points, – which was very difficult if not impossible. You had to decide whether to risk it – the Ukrainian police, known as "militsia" randomly check tourist' photos at checkpoints by clicking on the camera's review button. If they find any pictures breaking rules, they will confiscate them (often by taking the memory stick). The militsia reserves the right to confiscate any items from tourists taking the trip.

A botanical effect of the Chernobyl explosion. This tree is growing along the ground like a vine.

We all stared at Reactor No. 4 while Vladimir told us that nobody knows what is going on inside of it. The sarcophagus built around it to keep the radiation in has sealed it completely. Scientists can only theorize about what is going on inside: it's believed chemical reactions have given birth to new elements. We also learned that the hastily built sarcophagus is deteriorating. Several attempts had been made to begin a second protective layer around the first, but funding was – and still is – a major issue, and the project wasn't started until 2007. The new 1.7 billion dollar construction is estimated to be completed by 2012.

We got back in the minivan and headed for the ghost town of Pripyat, where there was another checkpoint where our passports were checked to make sure we were on the militsia's list. 

Pripyat was a city of 43,000 where the plant workers lived. Our guide told us that before the accident it had the highest birth rate in Ukraine. The city was prospering. Now, more than 20 years after the accident, the radiation level still makes the city uninhabitable. Most of the windows are broken. Trees and shrubbery are overgrown, slowly growing into the buildings. We were brought to an empty elementary school. The floors are covered with glass, papers, pieces of wood, books, notebooks, Soviet posters, and random items such as a shoe or a doll. You can still read the teachers' Russian writing on the chalkboards: one lesson was practice dictating telephone numbers. We also visited a commercial building with trees growing out of the floors, glass and other debris all over, walls missing – it looks like it had been through a war, but it's just the result of the elements' wear without human upkeep. We also walked through a recreation facility and amusement park – both built not long before the accident.

At the amusement park our guide, Vladimir, brought us over to a highly radioactive patch of grass about 6x4 feet in the middle of the concrete. "Don't step here," he said, as we all crouched around him snapping pictures of the radiation detector in his hand going berserk. He also showed us a deformed tree that was lying on its side with the branches growing straight up. After a few minutes at the amusement park, he said, "Let's go. We can't stay here. It's not clean."

Bumper cars left in the abandoned amusement park in Pripyat.

We got in the minivan again and Vladimir told us we were about to drive through a highly radioactive zone. Again he held up the radiation detector so we knew when radiation was rising or falling. By this time, the group mood was slightly depressed – no more questions for the guide, no dark banter tossed around. We all sat silently and either stared out the window or watched Vladimir's radiation detector. I think most of us were ready for the tour to be over.

We pulled up to a small building and were told to get out. It was the last control point, and it was time to measure our radiation. Vladimir showed us how to stand between two pieces of metal, looking forward with our hands placed on the sides while the machine took a few seconds to determine whether we were "clean." I had read in my guidebook that only one person on these tours had ever actually set it off – a Dutch photographer who had wandered off from the group.

We were brought back to InterInform and were stuffed full of borsh, bread, buns, carrot salad, fish, cabbage-stuffed pelmeni, and a turkey hotdish. They brought each dish out to us rapidly and if we hadn't finished the one prior they'd try to take it away. Our tables were piled with plates of food at various stages of consumption. Although there had been less walking than I thought there would have been, it had been an exhausting day both physically and emotionally and we found we were all starving. We got back in the bus, and most people slept on the way back to Kiev.

While a tour of a radioactive fallout-out zone is not likely to be something you would do twice or perhaps even want to do twice – it is something I'm glad I did once. 

By Lisa Horner
graduate of the Translate Abroad Program through The School of Russian and Asian Studies (SRAS)

The Sun

The sun

Now we continue the journey toward the sun. We already know the sun. Below are a few posts about the sun. what is the sun?

The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields. It has a diameter of about 1,392,000 km, about 109 times that of Earth, and its mass (about 2×1030 kilograms, 330,000 times that of Earth) accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. Chemically, about three quarters of the Sun's mass consists of hydrogen, while the rest is mostly helium. Less than 2% consists of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon, iron, and others.

The Sun is fueled by nuclear fusion reactions. The light from the Sun heats our planet and makes life possible. The Sun is also an active star that displays sunspots, solar flares, erupting prominences, and coronal mass ejections. These phenomena, which are all related to the Sun's magnetic field, impact our near-Earth space environment and determine our "space weather". In about five billion years, the Sun will evolve into a Red Giant, and eventually, a White Dwarf star. Many cultures have had interesting myths about the Sun, in recognition of its importance to life on Earth.

The parts of the Sun above the photosphere are referred to collectively as the solar atmosphere. The coolest layer of the Sun is a temperature minimum region about 500 km above the photosphere, with a temperature of about 4,100 K. This part of the Sun is cool enough to support simple molecules such as carbon monoxide and water, which can be detected by their absorption spectra.

sunboy

Above the temperature minimum layer is a layer about 2,000 km thick, dominated by a spectrum of emission and absorption lines. It is called the chromosphere from the Greek root chroma, meaning color.

Above the chromosphere, in a thin (about 200 km) transition region, the temperature rises rapidly from around 20,000 K in the upper chromosphere to coronal temperatures closer to 1,000,000 K.

The corona is the extended outer atmosphere of the Sun, which is much larger in volume than the Sun itself. The corona continuously expands into space forming the solar wind, which fills all the Solar System.[58] The low corona, which is very near the surface of the Sun, has a particle density around 1015–1016 m−3.

The heliosphere, which is the cavity around the Sun filled with the solar wind plasma, extends from approximately 20 solar radii (0.1 AU) to the outer fringes of the Solar System. Its inner boundary is defined as the layer in which the flow of the solar wind becomes superalfvénic—that is, where the flow becomes faster than the speed of Alfvén waves. Turbulence and dynamic forces outside this boundary cannot affect the shape of the solar corona within, because the information can only travel at the speed of Alfvén waves. The solar wind travels outward continuously through the heliosphere, forming the solar magnetic field into a spiral shape, until it impacts the heliopause more than 50 AU from the Sun. In December 2004, the Voyager 1 probe passed through a shock front that is thought to be part of the heliopause. Both of the Voyager probes have recorded higher levels of energetic particles as they approach the boundary.

Mars, "Red Planet"

Mars in 1980 as seen by the Viking 1 Orbiter

 After writing about the beauty of the place where on earth so now we see the planet mars.
Do you believe that one day humans could live on planet mars? Do you want to live in mars? So let's see how the situation on the planet mars. 

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance.
Mars is a terrestrial planet with a thin atmosphere, having surface features reminiscent both of the impact craters of the Moon and the volcanoes, valleys, deserts, and polar ice caps of Earth. The rotational period and seasonal cycles of Mars are likewise similar to those of Earth, as is the tilt that produces the seasons. Mars is the site of Olympus Mons, the highest known mountain within the Solar System, and of Valles Marineris, the largest canyon. The smooth Borealis basin in the northern hemisphere covers 40% of the planet and may be a giant impact feature

Size comparison of Earth and Mars

Size comparison of Earth and Mars.

Mars has approximately half the radius of Earth. It is less dense than Earth, having about 15% of Earth's volume and 11% of the mass. Its surface area is only slightly less than the total area of Earth's dry land.
Mars has two permanent polar ice caps. During a pole's winter, it lies in continuous darkness, chilling the surface and causing 25–30% of the atmosphere to condense out into thick slabs of CO2 ice (dry ice). When the poles are again exposed to sunlight, the frozen CO2 sublimes, creating enormous winds that sweep off the poles as fast as 400 km/h. These seasonal actions transport large amounts of dust and water vapor, giving rise to Earth-like frost and large cirrus clouds. Clouds of water-ice were photographed by the Opportunity rover in 2004.

The tenuous atmosphere of Mars

The atmosphere on Mars consists of 95% carbon dioxide, 3% nitrogen, 1.6% argon and contains traces of oxygen and water. The atmosphere is quite dusty, containing particulates about 1.5 µm in diameter which give the Martian sky a tawny color when seen from the surface.
Martian surface temperatures vary from lows of about −87 °C (−125 °F) during the polar winters to highs of up to −5 °C (23.0 °F) in summers. The wide range in temperatures is due to the thin atmosphere which cannot store much solar heat, the low atmospheric pressure, and the low thermal inertia of Martian soil.
Mars’ average distance from the Sun is roughly 230 million km (1.5 AU) and its orbital period is 687 (Earth) days. The solar day (or sol) on Mars is only slightly longer than an Earth day: 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35.244 seconds. A Martian year is equal to 1.8809 Earth years, or 1 year, 320 days, and 18.2 hours.

Phobos (left) and Deimos (right)

Mars has two tiny natural moons, Phobos and Deimos, which orbit very close to the planet. Both satellites were discovered in 1877 by Asaph Hall, and are named after the characters Phobos (panic/fear) and Deimos (terror/dread) who, in Greek mythology, accompanied their father Ares, god of war, into battle. Ares was known as Mars to the Romans.

Photograph of a Martian sunset taken by Spirit at Gusev crater, May 19, 2005.

Do you still want to live in mars? I would rather prefer to live on earth, because earth is a planet that has been created by God for human life. So I think the earth is the best place for human beings.

Luang Prabang

"The rest of the way you climb up on the left side of the waterfall, where little water is running but the stone is surprisingly not slippery at all but grips under your feet" 

Kuang Si waterfalls, nearby Luang Prabang

Luang Prabang has both natural and historical sites. Among the natural tourism sites, there are the Kuang Si Falls and Pak Ou Caves. Tourists may also ride elephants. At the end of the main street of Luang Prabang is a night market where stalls sell shirts, bracelets, tea - suitable souvenirs. The Haw Kham Royal Palace Museum and the Wat Xieng Thong temple are among the most well known historical sites. Along with the magnificent wats a significant part of the old town's appeal are the many French provincial style houses.
As China has recently allowed its citizens to travel more freely to Laos,^[2] the number of tourists in the area is expected to increase rapidly, creating pressure to modernize the tourist infrastructure, particularly catering to package tourism.