Travel back in time to a concrete memorial to the heroic dreams of the USSR
According to the London Daily Telegraph, Chernobyl has become “an unlikely tourist destination.” But why so unlikely? After all, as the home of the world's worst nuclear disaster, surely it deserves a visit.
And these days, visitors have ready access. Scheduled flights to the capital of the Ukraine can be combined with competitively priced $190 packages specially tailored to visiting the infamous reactor.
Travel companies in Kiev line up to take day-trippers on guided tours around the Chernobyl power plant and its poisonous environs.
One typical tour offers to let you “Experience the peace and quiet of the ghost-town Prypyat” (where “all 47,500 inhabitants had to abandon their homes the day after the accident”!) “Explore the deserted apartment blocks, schools, hotels, kinder gardens [sic].”
This is followed by lunch. We are reassured that “the quality of food is guaranteed” though its radioactivity levels are not. In the afternoon, a briefing is conducted by a specialist of a governmental agency to provide you with “answers to your questions about the current ecological situation and the future of the exclusion zone.”
Lucky tourists, armed with Geiger counters, can even find their way into the radiation zone, where they will be shown family homes, abandoned “Pompeii-style” (the unfortunate Roman City buried in poisonous ash after the eruption of Vesuvius) and unchanged since they were evacuated at a few minutes' notice.
The zone is also a strange time capsule of the vanished Soviet era. A bust of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin still greets the travelers at the plant's en-trance. Prypyat, once the area's largest city, is now a ghost town whose melancholy concrete apartment blocks, still bedecked with uplifting communist slogans, offer pitiful reminders of the desperate evacuation. In an abandoned playground, a motionless Ferris wheel waits forever for the children to return. Family photographs, upturned furniture, shoes, clothes and other belongings lie where they fell as the shroud of plutonium settled over the city.
Clutching their radiation badges ever more earnestly, tourists can also see a graveyard of vehicles used in the heroic attempts to seal the broken reactor—hundreds of trucks, helicopters and armored personnel vehicles which, boast the brochures, are “so soaked with radiation that it is dangerous to approach too close.”
For naturalists, there are also some interesting botanical effects, in the inaccurately named “dead zone” or exclusion area around the ruined power station. In fact, wildlife has flourished since the local population fled. Nowadays the forests are rich in berries, mushrooms and animals, including some exotic varieties like the special Przhevalsky horses, brought in to eat the lush (and highly radioactive) grass. 
But the high point of the trip is the specially constructed viewing platform overlooking the concrete sarcophagus that encloses the remains of Chernobyl's Reactor Four...
Ominously, debris stacked against the inside of the existing shell's southern wall is slowly shifting and fissures are spreading across its surface.
The Chernobyl disaster occurred on April 26, 1986 when a powerful explosion destroyed the reactor, expelling a huge plume of radioactive dust that drifted across Europe.
Firefighters who fought the blaze were quickly killed by massive doses of radiation, and thousands of civilians are thought to have since died from radiation-induced cancers. About 200 tons of concrete and other debris mixed with nuclear fuel are still trapped under the hastily constructed concrete shell. In a comical attempt at security, areas of high radioactivity are marked off with triangular yellow signs.
Tour guides say that there is no health risk from taking the trips. Indeed, about 600 people have returned to live inside the dead zone, including Maria Dika, a security guard at Reactor Four on the night of the disaster, who had to have three months of treatment for acute radiation sickness. Now she reassures visitors that there are “no health problems. The radiation has got used to us.”
Even if eighty-five percent of the children in Belarus are born unhealthy, as governments know very well, links between radiation and illness are hard to prove, as few studies are conclusive. Illnesses induced by radiation exposure have a long latency period.
By Eastern European standards, the site is safe. By Western standards, the trip is probably more suitable for senior citizens who can benefit from the typically long latency period for aftereffects of radiation.
