 |
Home - Yahoo! - My Yahoo! - News Alerts - Help |
|
|
New - Commentary on Yahoo! News |
|
|
|||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||
| World News - updated 7:33 PM ET Dec 17 | |
Reuters | AP | ABCNEWS.com  |  Photos | Canada | Asia | UK & Ireland | More ...
|
|
By SERGEI SHARGORODSKY, Associated Press Writer CHERNOBYL, Ukraine (AP) - At first glance, it looks the same as the outside world: forests, fields and streams, peaceful village houses. But barbed-wire fences, radiation warning signs and checkpoints caution visitors that they are entering a different land. It's called the ``Zone,'' a term lifted from a Soviet science fiction novel written by the Strugatsky brothers more than a decade before the April 26, 1986, Chernobyl nuclear plant accident. Here the rivers, land and trees are poisoned by radiation, and a closer look reveals that the quiet wooden houses are crumbling structures abandoned 14 years ago. Barred to outsiders by about 800 guards, the 19-mile-radius zone around Chernobyl absorbed the bulk of the radioactive fallout from the 1986 explosion and fire. It covers 1,400 square miles and was once home to 120,000 people who lived in 90 communities. Winding roads now lead to ruined settlements. In a field, nearly 1,400 contaminated vehicles and aircraft used in the Chernobyl cleanup are rusting. The forests are rich in berries, mushrooms and animals, including some exotic varieties like the Przhevalsky horses brought here to eat and stamp out the high grass which is highly contaminated by radiation. Pripyat, once the area's largest city and home to 48,000 people before the accident, is a ghost town of apartment high-rises still sporting Communist Party slogans and Soviet-era symbols, overgrown bushes and an abandoned playground with a motionless Ferris wheel and broken toy cars. Electric poles and wires announce the approach to the Chernobyl plant itself. A giant red structure surrounded by rusty cranes is the remnant of two unfinished reactors. A sprawling building behind a fence houses reactors No. 1 and No. 2. A bust of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin greets visitors at the plant's entrance. Next to it stands a curvy modernist statue, a memorial to those who died trying to contain the 1986 catastrophe. Farther away is a huge building, its single smokestack supported by metal bearings. This is where it all happened 14 years ago. At one end is reactor No. 3, Chernobyl's last working one, which was stopped for good on Friday. The building's other reactor, No. 4, is encased in a 1.1-million-ton sarcophagus that looks like a haphazard assortment of cement and rust-streaked steel plates. Beneath is all that remains of reactor No. 4, a maze of collapsed ceilings, corridors littered with debris, and bizarre cankers produced by melted nuclear fuel that no human can approach without being killed by radiation. Just one brick-sized piece of fuel that recently fell onto the sarcophagus roof emits deadly radiation. And radiation on a balcony facing the sarcophagus is about 80 times normal background levels. The road out of the zone passes through the ``Red Forest'' - trees so damaged by radiation that they took on a reddish hue. Today, most of the forest is dead, and only a few dried trees stretch out their branches in a silent reminder of the century's worst nuclear accident.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Full Coverage
| Search News |
|
|
||||||||||||
|
|
Copyright © 2000 The Associated Press.
All rights reserved.
The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. Questions or Comments Privacy Policy - Terms of Service |