WhereIsAtlas · Disaster site

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

The 2,600 km² no-go zone created in 36 hours

Transformed — A 2,600 km² exclusion zone around the 1986 reactor disaster — sealed, studied, and briefly fought over.

On 26 April 1986, Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded during a safety test, releasing radioactive material across much of Europe. Within 36 hours the model city of Pripyat — 49,000 residents told they would return in three days — was evacuated. A 30-kilometre exclusion zone followed, eventually covering 2,600 km².

An estimated 600,000 'liquidators' — soldiers, miners, firefighters — contained the site at enormous personal cost. A concrete sarcophagus sealed the reactor in late 1986; the last operating Chernobyl reactor shut in 2000; and in 2016 a 36,000-tonne New Safe Confinement arch slid over the ruins, designed to last a century.

The zone became an accidental wildlife reserve — wolves, Przewalski's horses and lynx among the abandoned schools and Ferris wheel — and, until 2019's tourism boom and the 2022 Russian occupation, a strange legal no-man's-land. Around 200 elderly 'samosely' returnees still live inside it. Radiation levels in Pripyat remain far above background; scientists estimate full habitability is centuries away.

Quick facts

Disaster date
Apr 26, 1986
Evacuated city
Pripyat (49,000)
Zone size
2,600 km²
Liquidators
≈ 600,000
Confinement arch
Completed 2016
Returnees ('samosely')
≈ 200

Sources

Related: amelia earhart · nauru