Is travelling to Chernobyl safe for tourists?
- By
- Aparna Patel
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- 18 Jul, 2023
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I visited Chernobyl recently.
It is perfectly safe as long as you follow your guide and obey the rules and don’t wonder off on your own and don’t touch anything that might be contaminated.
Follow your guide and rent a Geiger counter before you go. Your Geiger counter will beep when it detects high levels of radiation, when that happens move out of the the area. When it beeps loud and fast, your receiving a high dose, you have 2 minutes to move quickly out of that area and into a safe one, I don’t think you need to learn about how to read and measure sieverts on the Geiger counter, all Geiger counters are set to go off as soon as they detect radiation.
Your guide and your Geiger counter will keep you safe. When you end your tour and leave the zone you will go to your last check point and enter a room to be examined, if the detector detects radiation on your clothes you will have to strip down and leave your clothes there, this is the only worse part of the tour, but this rarely happens.
Other than that, don’t put your hands in your mouth, and at the last check point wash your hands and hose down your shoes.
How did I miss this question?? I’ve done this! Before it was even considered ‘touristy’ (we had to apply to the Ukrainian government for permission in 2008).
Now on the safety aspect, I was assured by my science teacher travel buddy and the scientists there that it’s perfectly fine to go for a day. As for the radiation, apparently even spending a weekend in Devon is equivalent to 7 xrays, and this is less than that.
A lethal dose of radiation is in the range of 3-5 sieverts (300-500 roentgens) when administered within an hour. Levels on the tour range from 0.15 to several microsieverts per hour (15 to several hundred microroentgens an hour). A microsievert is one-millionth of a sievert. We didn’t see it go higher than 14 microsieverts, from memory, and that was only in the amusement park area in Pripyat – surprisingly higher than when we were closer to the reactor.
If you’d like to read more about the trip which I did in 2008, I wrote an article about it for TNT Magazine in London.
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I actually remember on Netflix watching an episode of a TV show where these adventists actually spent 48 hours in Chernobyl. Turns out the town is so isolated that the people and camera crew actually had to transfer from a passenger train in the Ukrane and finish the rest of the commute in a freight train car for 48 hours from the main transit hub.
From there, they actually interviewed some people who actually were living fairly normally despite the geiger meter being about 8x the safe radiation level, and they were saying how the reason they still lived there was because of family tradition.
Surprisingly the people never wore hazmat suits but still survived, although they were taking a ton of iodine and did get sick after awhile, but in the show they did go near the powerplant (still covered with cement blocks) and the radiation was ~32x higher than the safe limit — even at 2-3 miles from the plant.
I wish I had the name of the show in my head, but I’m pretty sure the channel was Sy-Fi or something like that — and overall it was a pretty interesting episode, especially how they showed the residents still living there actually have genetic changes to adapt to the higher radiation (although the area near the plant is literally a dead zone)
This is taken from the Wikipedia entry for Prypiat:
The city of Chernobyl, a few kilometers south from Pripyat, has some accommodation including a hotel, many apartment buildings, and a local lodge, which are maintained as a permanent residence for watch-standing crew and tourists.
Seems like at least there is a local effort to accomodate the few tourists that get there. Not the most inspirational location but I for once think that it would have some educational value to visit a place like that.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘