MOS: Chernobyl Part 2: Pripyat

Where were we? Oh yes, in Soviet Ukraine, reactor blows you!

Today’s Moment of Science… Chernobyl Part 2: Pripyat.

The community of Pripyat was built up just a few miles from the plant to become the ninth of the USSR’s atomgrads, or ‘atom cities.’ Though most nuclear cities didn’t make frequent habits of showing up on maps or letting in visitors on holiday, Pripyat was different. Visiting the promising young city wasn’t restricted, but perks of living there were reserved for comrades and their families whose work directly supported the nuclear facility. Pripyat: come for the prophetic good life in the Soviet Union, stay for the brutalist architecture that doubles as radiation shielding.

The average age of the 49,400 residents in Pripyat in 1986 was just 26 years old.

When reactor #4 tore itself open a mere three kilometers from their homes at 1:23am on April 26th, the immediate reactions weren’t terror or suspicion, but more… sleeping peacefully through the reactor meltdown next door.

With everything else that went bugnutty, it’s easy to assume that life went about normally the next day for residents while the sky rained invisible nuclear death. However, there was reportedly a shelter-in-place order, schools closed, and iodine tablets were distributed through the night.

You may be asking the obvious “why stay near the atomic kablooey when there’s allegedly no chance I’ll turn into Spiderman?” There’s a trade-off to be made in the decision between evacuation and sheltering-in-place. Those Pripyat apartment towers came with a perk of concrete walls which could block quite a bit of radiation. While it was still at “permissible” levels, and before understanding the scale of the disastrous radioactive plume barging into the night air, staying put temporarily while downing potassium iodide cocktails wasn’t necessarily an inept decision.

Also, a majority of citizens in the city did not have vehicles. It took a hot minute to round up transportation for 50,000 people and figure out where you’re going to send them while the potential routes out of town were also becoming more choked with nuclear fuckery by the minute.

The afternoon of April 27th, a twenty kilometer long caravan of 1,200 buses from across the Soviet Union arrived. The citizens of Pripyat were told to quickly pack for just a few days. Within three hours the last bus was loaded up and the now-former Pripyat citizens watched their home fade from view forever.

Well, most of them.

You see, Pripyat wasn’t just a collection of towers. It was a shining atomgrad on a hill, a symbol of dreams fulfilled for how the Soviet Union pictured itself and it’s future. As a ghost town though, it became a more realistic symbol of the Soviet Union. In the two years after the accident, the city of Slavutych was built up as a new home for the people who were displaced from Pripyat. Planned cooperatively with eight Soviet republics, the city had unique sections with culture and architectural style imbued from each republic. It had a community center, sports facilities, medical clinics, and hotels. It was a modern city of the future, built to be inhabited by people forever haunted by the past.

It’s hard to look at Slavutych with the culture, modern conveniences, and lack of seventeen-eyed frogs and not see it as an upgrade. But there’s no place like home, and there were folks who swore that Pripyat was better.

So some moved back.

Estimates vary, but about 180 someodd former Pripyat residents had a pilgrimage back to the village of the atomically fucked and reclaimed their homes. One resident, Baba Ginia, said “I am not afraid of radiation. I boil the mushrooms till all the radiation is gone!”

Having a Ukrainian grandmother, who am I to argue?

Today, Pripyat is not what you’d expect given the radioactive plume it sat under. As far as “I’m not entirely attached to my thyroid” tourism goes, Pripyat is- and hear me out- a calculated risk that’s not out of the question if you’re on a guided tour. Your hourly dose of radiation in most areas is typically 0.1mSv, which is the same as one chest x-ray. Which isn’t going to cause long term issues if you’re there for a short time, but you shouldn’t get a chest x-ray hourly. The radiation level can go higher than that, so please, don’t lick the science.

I can tell myself over and over that there was a monumental effort to make the place safe-ish, but somewhere in my brain it feels absurd that you can just walk into the city for a day and it’s fine.

Given the magnitude of the disaster, it all prompts the question… how much human suffering was thrown at the clean-up effort?

This has been part two of a continuing MOS series on Chernobyl, reminding you that every good science story is really a history story.

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