![]() In Kiev, where I started my trip, one normally receives 0.1 millionths of a sievert every hour. The world is normally bathed in a low level of radiation. (Science, like journalism, can be a dirty job, but someone has to do it.) A car shuttles there every week to collect stool samples from workers to test for any plutonium they might have accidentally absorbed. I drove to Chernobyl with health physicist Vadim Chumak at the Research Center for Radiation Medicine at the Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine and his colleagues. This "exclusion zone" is now open to tourism. But just how safe is the zone now?Īfter the explosions, it was unclear how contaminated the surroundings were, so the authorities declared an arbitrary 30-kilometer distance from the reactor off-limits, and roughly 115,000 people were evacuated from the area. Now, almost 25 years after the disaster, the Ukrainian government has officially opened the area up for tourism. ![]() 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, releasing approximately 400 times more radioactive fallout than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. ![]() local time, explosions destroyed reactor No. CHERNOBYL, Ukraine-The face mask and three radiation monitors I'm wearing here are grim reminders that I'm at the site of the worst nuclear accident in history. ![]()
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