12 UPDATE July/August 2019 Travel News
Tourism booms - thanks to TV series
T
he site where a nuclear reactor exploded in Ukraine 33 years ago is experiencing a surge in tourism - all thanks to the hugely successful HBO mini-series
‘Chernobyl’.
And tourism in Baltic state and EU member Lithuania is also expecting a boom because its nuclear sister plant of Chernobyl, at Ignalina, on the border with Latvia, is open for tours of the plant which is in the process of being closed down.
Day tours to Chernobyl from Ukraine’s capital Kiev have been operating for the last couple of years, and have been given the offi cial green light by the Ukrainian government.
Visitor number and enquiries are up almost 50 per cent as tourists fl ock to experience the area around the plant which retains the feel of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where wild animals roam and vegetation encroaches into windowless, abandoned buildings strewn with rubble.
In Pripyat, the ghost town once home to 50,000 people who mainly worked at the plant, an amusement park houses a rusting hulk of a merry-go-round and dodgem-car track, and a giant Ferris wheel that never went into operation.
The wheel was to open on May 1 — the traditional May Day holiday - and the picture of the Ferris wheel is one of the favourite images captured by day trippers. However, in spite of the infl ux of tourists fl ocking to the site, questions remain as to the safety of the area given the magnitude of the radioactive material which remains and the fact that its eff ects are expected to last a millennium.
One guide Viktoria Brozhko told Reuters: “During the entire visit to the Chernobyl exclusion zone, you get around two microsieverts, which is equal to the amount of radiation you’d get staying at home for 24
hours.” But other reports suggest that Pripyat “will not be inhabitable for another 20,000 years.” Visitors to the site are instructed not to sit down, and are checked for radioactive particles before leaving. Yaroslav Yemelianenko, Director of Chernobyl Tour, said he is experiencing an increase of up to 40 per cent in visitors because of theacclaimed HBO mini- series..
His company off ers a special tour of locations depicted in the series, including the bunker where the initial decision by local offi cials not to evacuate after the explosion was made.
Day-trippers board buses in the centre of Kiev and are driven 75 miles to the area, where they can see monuments to the victims and abandoned villages and have lunch in the only restaurant in the town of Chernobyl.
They are then taken to see reactor number four, which since 2017 has been covered by a vast metal dome 344 ft high which envelops the exploded core. The day fi nishes with a walk around the town of Pripyat which was totally evacuated in the days following the disaster. The Russian government reported that 31 people were killed immediately after the tragedy, and sought to keep the true extent and seriousness of the disaster secret, even delaying evacuation of people from the immediate area.
However, studies since the explosion estimates the total death toll from the Chernobyl disaster to be as high as 115,000, mainly eff ecting Ukraine and adjoining Belarus. But it could have been far, far worse if the fi re had not been prevented from spreading to the other three reactors, with the death toll counted in millions. Radio active fall-out was detected soon after the disaster in Scandinavia while movement of sheep was restricted as close to home as the Welsh hills..
CHERNOBYL: is now attracting up to 50 per
cent more visitors thanks to the success of the acclaimed TV series of the same name. The reactor damaged in the explosion has now been entombed in a protective concrete blanket. As well as taking day trips to Chernobyl from Kiev in Ukraine, you can see its sister plant, Ignalina in Lithuania, which was used in the fi lming of the HBO mini-series in day trips from Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, which has direct fl ights from Belfast and was used as a screen double for Chernobyl in the fi lming of the HBO’s acclaimed mini-series
Tours to Chernobyl’s screen ‘double’ selling well
MOST of the action scenes in the acclaimed HBO series Chernobyl were fi lmed in Lithuania, near the town of Visaginas on the border with Latvia, at the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP). The show’s production team sought a realistic representation of the original Ukrainian power plant and found INPP was built in the same era, making it the perfect on-screen double for the Chernobyl site. Indeed, fans of the TV series can now get closer to the action, with exclusive tours and site visits, to Ignalina, a sister plant of Chernobyl which is currently being closed down and decommissioned which could take another 20 years. Indeed the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant will not be fully dismantled until 2038, The Ignalina nuclear power plant, located 90 minutes from Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, off ers popular excursions to its controlled INPP zone, home to the plant’s reactor room, turbine room, and block control panel. These excursions need to be booked up to two months in advance and last two and a half hours, taking place on weekdays until 13.00, for groups not exceeding 15 people.
The power plant is still active and currently employs about 2,000 people, about a third of the number that was employed when the reactors were in operation (the fi rst block of the INPP was decommissioned in 2004, the second – in 2009). During excursions, current employees are quite happy to chat about their life and work in Visaginas.
Almost 100,000 visitors from around the world have visited the plant since the opening of the information centre of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in 1995. Located in the town of Visaginas, several kilometres away from INPP, is the operating simulator of the INPP block control panel. Set up when the power plant was being built, the simulator has been used for training employees and exploring solutions to emergency situations. During excursions, visitors have the chance to see how the power plant control simulator in operation. Incidentally, this simulator served as a model for the Chernobyl creative team.
Visaginas, known as the “nuclear town”, was built in 1975 to accommodate the employees of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant.
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