text: "To the world, Chernobyl and Fukushima seem like dangerous places, but for the people who live there, that danger is simply a fact of life," says photojournalist Michael Forster Rothbart, who spent two years cataloging the lives of people living in the shadow of nuclear accidents. These images are the result. 
   
   "Most photojournalists distort Chernobyl. They visit briefly, expecting danger and despair, and come away with photos of deformed children and abandoned buildings," Forster Rothbart says in his new book, Would You Stay? "This sensationalist approach obscures more complex stories about how displaced communities adapt and survive." 
   
   Forster Rothbart's book is about the relative normalcy of people's lives near Chernobyl and Fukushima. But he does find a lot of danger and despair, of course. Would You Stay? is full of people living with cancer. The towns around Chernobyl are depressed, and lacking opportunity. Young people leave if they get the chance. Many of the residents are older, with more invested in the area. In Fukushima, where the disaster happened more recently, people are living in a state of limbo, not knowing when, or if, they might be able to return to their homes. 
   
   Authorities ringed Chernobyl with four zones following the 1986 nuclear disaster. Nearest the site is the Exclusion Zone, where people are not supposed to live at all (though about 400 "self-settlers" do, and there's all kinds of "smuggling, research, farming, tourism, poaching" going on, Forster Rothbart says). Then come three further zones where "evacuation was merely encouraged, not mandatory." They contain 2,293 villages with about 1.6 million inhabitants. 
   
   Up to 3,800 people still work at the Chernobyl plant, "not doing very much." The site, which had three other reactors, stopped producing electricity in 2000. But workers have to stay while decommissioning is completed—a process that could take years due to chronic under-funding. 
   
   Forster Rothbart has seen the effects of environmental damage in Bhopal, India, Azerbaijan, and the Canadian Arctic. What separates Chernobyl and Fukushima, he says, is the insidiousness of the contamination. Nobody quite knows how it will affect them: 
   
   "When your home gets washed away, the damage you see is immediate and obvious," he says. "When you are hit by radiation, the consequences are never so clear. It’s all a game of probabilities. How much? How dangerous? How soon will it affect me?" 
   
   The people living around Chernobyl are still unsure about the risks 27 years after the fact. And now the same thing is happening Fukushima, though residents have access to daily radiation reports: 
   
   Says Forster Rothbart: "What I saw in Fukushima is that many evacuees are living in a state of limbo, still staying in temporary housing, waiting to learn if they’ll be able to return home, waiting for more answers that never seem to come." ||||| SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email 
   
   Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images 
   
   Ukraine’s looking toward the sun to put a radioactive wasteland back into business. 
   
   Thirty years after atomic fallout from the Chernobyl meltdown rendered an area the size of Luxembourg uninhabitable for centuries, Ukraine is seeking investors to develop solar power near the defunct Soviet reactors. 
   
   Sunshine is one of the only things that can be harvested from Chernobyl’s 1,000 square mile exclusion zone, where long-lasting radiation makes farming and forestry too dangerous. Save for the guards and workers who maintain the roadblocks and barriers, the area about 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of Kiev remains devoid of productive activities. 
   
   “The Chernobyl site has really good potential for renewable energy,” Ukraine’s environment minister Ostap Semerak, 44, said at an interview in London. “We already have high-voltage transmission lines that were previously used for the nuclear stations, the land is very cheap and we have many people trained to work at power plants.” 
   
   The move to solar at Chernobyl may also help Ukraine move closer toward the European Union and influence public opinion in conflict zones along the Russian border. 
   
   “We have normal European priorities, which means having the best standards with the environment and clean energy ambitions,” said Semerak. “We want to be a successful Ukraine, to show people in the conflict zone that life is better and more comfortable with us.” 
   
   Ukraine’s government remains in an uneasy cease-fire with Kremlin-backed rebels in the eastern region of Donbass along the Russian border. Both sides have struggled to implement obligations outlined under the Minsk Accords and international monitors still report outbreaks of violence, which has left thousands dead and displaced from their homes. 
   
   Until recently, Ukraine was heavily dependent on natural gas imported from Russia. The government has been weaning itself from over-reliance following consecutive winters when Russia threatened to withhold supplies because of payment disputes. Last year Ukraine more than halved consumption from its eastern neighbor, according to Ukrtransgaz PJSC. 
   
   With solar resources better than Germany’s, which has almost 39 gigawatts of panels installed, Ukraine is increasing its focus on renewables. The government’s initial 1 gigawatt solar target could cost about 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion). 
   
   Source: Solargis 
   
   The environmental ministry has received expressions of interest for its Chernobyl solar complex from two U.S. investment firms and four Canadian energy companies, Semerak said. Ukrainian developers plan to install 4 megawatts of panels on the site by year-end. 
   
   The European Bank for Reconstruction & Development is also considering financing, though the talks are at early stages. 
   
   “We can consider such projects like all other renewable projects subject to there being credible and viable investment proposals and all other environmental issues and risks can be addressed to our satisfaction,” said Sevki Acuner, the EBRD’s director for Ukraine. 
   
   If the project takes off, it may evolve into a bigger initiative that leverages the transmission lines with 4 gigawatts capacity that are already onsite -- a legacy of the nuclear plant. 
   
   Watch Next: Capturing Iceland's Winds ||||| Before the fire, the vomiting, the deaths and the vanishing home, it was the promise of bumper cars that captured the imagination of the boys. 
   
   It will be 30 years ago Tuesday that Pripyat and the nearby Chernobyl nuclear plant became synonymous with nuclear disaster, that the word Chernobyl came to mean more than just a little village in rural Ukraine, and this place became more than just another spot in the shadowy Soviet Union. 
   
   Even 30 years later – 25 years after the country that built it ceased to exist – the full damage of that day is still argued. 
   
   Death toll estimates run from hundreds to millions. The area near the reactor is both a teeming wildlife refuge and an irradiated ghost-scape. Much of eastern and central Europe continues to deal with fallout aftermath. The infamous Reactor Number 4 remains a problem that is neither solved nor solvable. 
   
   But on the night before their world changed, nothing seemed more important to the boys than shiny blue and yellow cars, with actual steering wheels, almost ready for a 10-year-old to drive. 
   
   They knew they would have to wait till May 1, 1986, for the bumper cars to be turned on – a seemingly impossible-to-live-through week away. So Alexandr Sirota and his friends couldn’t resist sneaking into the new park after dark, beneath the deep shadows of the yet-unblinking new Ferris wheel, and under the inky dark of what would soon be the electrified roof over the bumper cars. 
   
   “We’d sit in the cars and make car noises,” recalls Sirota, who’s now 40. “It was everything we could imagine wanting in life at that time. As young boys, our lives seemed perfect.” 
   
   It wasn’t just the new bumper cars, or the new amusement park. Their hometown, Pripyat, had been swampland 30 years before. Now it was a city built to serve the future. And the driver of that future was visible southeast of town, the four massive reactors of the Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, which in common parlance was called Chernobyl, for a village some 9 miles distant. 
   
   As the boys sat in the bumper cars, dreaming of the future, they knew what had to happen next. An adult would flip switches and draw some of the plentiful electricity a mile down the wires from the station, probably Reactor Number 4, as that was the nearest. The rest would be magic. Life would be magic. 
   
   Those were the thoughts that consumed Sirota’s dreams as he went to bed on April 25, 1986, and after he woke on April 26 and rushed off to School No. 1. Looking back ,it was the death of this dreamlike childhood that would come to haunt him – as much as the months of hospitalizations, as much as the Geiger counter that became his most common clothing accessory, as much as watching his mother’s beautiful, long, blond hair fall out in clumps. 
   
   For Sirota, the worst nuclear accident in history didn’t begin dramatically. That morning, he sat in class and contemplated how to best glue colored paper to a jar as a May Day gift for his mother. 
   
   We knew, with certainty, with arrogant certainty, that we were in control of the power we were playing with. This was the day . . . we learned we were wrong. Sergiy Parashyn, Chernobyl engineer 
   
   “Someone came in the room and called our teacher, said it was an emergency meeting in the teachers’ meeting room,” Sirota recalls. “We were told to study quietly. Of course we didn’t. The teachers were gone forever. For more than an hour we sat around. I suppose they were trying to figure out what to do, and it wasn’t an easy discussion. Something was wrong, but we didn’t know exactly what.” 
   
   Slowly word filtered through the school that the meeting was about problems at the plant. The kids pressed their noses against the glass of the classroom windows to watch as, across the street, on the manicured lawn of the city’s new hospital, the first military helicopters landed. They were soon surrounded by a jumbled chaos of emergency vehicles. 
   
   The kids opened windows and started shouting questions to those milling about on the street below. “What happened?” “Have you seen it?” “Is that the army?” But the adults didn’t know much more. It was a fire at the nuclear plant. Someone used the word “avariya,” meaning “accident.” 
   
   The aspen, birch, fir and oak trees in the small strip of forest outside the windows blocked their view, but the students knew there was a bridge just a short run away from which they could peer at the accident without obstruction. 
   
   “To kids, it was too tempting to pass up,” Sirota recalls. 
   
   He grabbed his jar, some paper and glue – evidence that he intended to work on the gift – and sprinted toward the plant. 
   
   Sirota wasn’t the first to reach the small bridge, which ran over rail lines on the south side of town, but he remembers that it wasn’t yet crowded, either. He remembers running up to the railing, half throwing himself in the way that boys do, eyes wide, hoping to see excitement. 
   
   Instead, he saw smoke, and not enough to hold the attention of a 10-year-old for long. 
   
   “It looked more like fog than fire,” he recalls. “We were looking at the reactor, but we couldn’t see any destruction.” 
   
   The bridge they were standing on wasn’t yet known as “The Bridge of Death.” That would come later. 
   
   [SEKTOR 2] 
   
   Panic sets in at Reactor Number 4 
   
   Early that morning, just after 1 a.m., while those in Pripyat dozed, the engineers who’d spent the previous 24 hours putting Reactor Number 4 through a stress test were getting nervous. The readings weren’t right. The radiation levels were climbing too high. 
   
   But the Soviet mindset at 1 a.m. on April 26, 1986, was very different from what it would be 24 hours later. In fact, the global perception of nuclear power was about to change. 
   
   “We knew, with certainty, with arrogant certainty, that we were in control of the power we were playing with. We could make the forces of nature bend to our will. There was nothing we could not do,” recalls Sergiy Parashyn, who’d been an engineer at the plant since 1977 and had arrived there within the hour. “This was the day, of course, when we learned we were wrong.” 
   
   Parashyn, who later would become the director of the complex and remains one of Ukraine’s foremost experts on nuclear energy, says that as the dials indicated problems, the safe approach would have been to shut down the test. 
   
   “If we had, all would have been well,” he says. “That was not the course chosen.” 
   
   Later reports would call the staff inexperienced, poorly trained. But that was not how they perceived themselves, Parashyn recalls. In their own minds, they were the best and the brightest, leading the way into a glorious future where power was abundant and life would have no limits. Their plant, after all, was only 16 years old. 
   
   So as the radiation levels climbed, instead of stopping the test, those in charge ordered it to continue. They would find the limits and learn from that. And when they reached that limit, and the temperature inside the sealed reactor began to climb, and climb beyond expectations, Parashyn says they did what seemed prudent: They hit what he calls “the shut-down button.” 
   
   We knew, with certainty, with arrogant certainty, that we were in control of the power we were playing with. This was the day . . . we learned we were wrong. Sergiy Parashyn, Chernobyl engineer 
   
   It turned out to be a huge mistake. 
   
   “Imagine you are driving a car, quite fast, and you see an obstacle in the road,” he explains. “Naturally, you hit the brakes to slow down and avoid the obstacle. But now imagine that the brakes have been wired incorrectly, and touching the brakes actually acts as an accelerator. When you try to slow down, you speed up, into the obstacle. 
   
   “Chernobyl was built with this mistake. Had the operators done nothing, it would have been fine – it would have corrected itself – but they had no way to know this, until this moment.” 
   
   Even 30 years later, nuclear physicists familiar with the disaster disagree on what went wrong. The only area of agreement appears to be that somehow when the engineers attempted to slow the nuclear reaction by inserting control rods into the reactor core, the process actually sped up. 
   
   It was a known flaw. Something similar had happened three years earlier during tests in Lithuania, and a warning had gone out, recalls Georgi Kopchinsky, who on April 26, 1986, was a director of the Soviet central committee on nuclear energy. As he talks about Chernobyl, he wrings his hands, smokes nervously and admits it’s a very tough topic for him. 
   
   “We knew this,” he says. “Three years earlier we’d sent out a warning to all plants with reactors with these absorbers, warning of this problem. But no actions had been taken. This was our arrogance at the time. We believed we were the masters of the atomic reactions. It was a horrible mistake.” 
   
   When Chernobyl’s operators raised the control rods into the reactor to absorb the flying neutrons and slow down the reaction, the action took only about 15 seconds to complete. But in those seconds, the reaction, instead of slowing, sped up and the temperature inside the reactor reached 3,000 degrees, turning the water used to cool the uranium into steam. 
   
   In the sealed environment of the reactor, the steam had no place to expand. That’s when the roof blew, and an estimated 10 tons of the 200 tons of enriched uranium blasted into the atmosphere. 
   
   After the roof blew, the walls collapsed and the superheated uranium melted and consumed all that fell into it. The long-term problem was forming, a 2,000-ton mass of metal, concrete and uranium that was pooling below the reactor. 
   
   But that was a long-term problem. The more immediate concern was the 10 tons of enriched uranium streaming into the atmosphere above Chernobyl, and spreading out in all directions over northern, eastern and central Europe. Eventually, a scientific report commissioned by the European Parliament would estimate that, to some extent, Chernobyl radiation contaminated 40 percent of Europe. 
   
   The time was 1:23 a.m. The world had changed. But those sleeping just downwind had no idea. 
   
   [ Sektor 3] 
   
   The Bridge of Death 
   
   It was about 9 a.m. when Sirota got bored and decided to leave the bridge. 
   
   Earlier, in the dark, the bridge had been crowded with adults watching the multicolored flames of burning graphite from the reactor. They’d “oohed” and “aahed.” It was beautiful. They’d also been soaking up a radiation dose determined to be about 500 roentgen, or two-thirds of a fatal dose. The legend is that none of those who stood on the bridge that morning survived. 
   
   Sirota says that isn’t true. He survived. He saw others who survived. Still, as he left the bridge, he was leaving behind many who would soon die agonizing deaths. 
   
   All told, about 4,000 people would eventually die from the accident, according to a report by the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency. 
   
   Others say those numbers are wildly low. Alexey Yablokov, a former environment adviser to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, estimated the global death toll to be 1.44 million. Other reports placed the cancer death totals at 30,000 to 60,000. Belarusian physicist Georgiy Lepin, a vice president of the association of liquidators of Chernobyl, the men brought in to fight the fire and clean up, estimated that within a few years, 13,000 rescue workers had died and another 70,000 were left unfit for work. The official number of disabled Chernobyl rescue workers today in Ukraine is 106,000. 
   
   A United Nations study says that “5 million people currently live in areas of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine that are contaminated with radionuclides due to the accident; about 100,000 of them live in areas classified in the past by government authorities as areas of ‘strict control.’ ” About 4,000 people, mostly children, developed thyroid cancer from the radiation, the U.N. says; the survival rate for the cancer is 99 percent. 
   
   Sirota, of course, knew none of this that morning. 
   
   Clutching his jar, his glue, his colored papers, and knowing that school was out, he did what any 10-year-old boy would as the world was collapsing. He ran home to see whether he could find his mom. 
   
   She found him. She was dressed for the office, her long blond hair perfect, falling across her shoulders, as always. He noted that she wasn’t happy. She scolded him for his dirty school clothes. She asked if he’d been anywhere near the plant. He lied and said the students had been cleaning the schoolyard, a lie she would not learn about for a decade. 
   
   We knew, with certainty, with arrogant certainty, that we were in control of the power we were playing with. This was the day . . . we learned we were wrong. Sergiy Parashyn, Chernobyl engineer 
   
   She worked for the Pripyat Palace of Culture. She oversaw the city’s literary needs, bringing in books and writers, and organizing a “Workers Writing Program.” That day she was hosting a poetry reading. 
   
   It was hard to imagine that the news from the plant was bad. The city looked normal. 
   
   “She told me to stay inside until she got home, just in case,” he recalls. 
   
   Their apartment was on the southern edge of town, and faced the reactor. From a higher floor, above the trees, he could have looked at it. As it was, he opened the window and straddled the sill, talking with the friends below who had managed to get away from school and then back outside. 
   
   They’d talk, then run off and gather another tidbit of information and run back to shout it at him. It became a game. 
   
   When his mom returned, it was with the news that they’d need to prepare for a three-day evacuation. As the sky outside his window glowed red, she put him to bed in his coat and boots. He woke to loudspeakers: “Attention, attention, dear comrades. . . . In the interest of the safety of the people, which is a priority to us, there is reason to evacuate.” 
   
   The announcement warned that they were to leave at 2 p.m. Buses would be provided, and they’d be taken to their evacuation locations. They were told not to worry. Police would watch their homes and make sure there was no looting. 
   
   “Only take what is necessary and vital documents,” the loudspeakers repeated, over and over. 
   
   “We were going away for a few days. It seemed like a picnic, like an adventure,” Sirota recalls. He filled a little suitcase with two changes of clothes, some pajamas. His mom made room in her bag for a few of his favorite toys. “It never occurred to me that we wouldn’t be coming back, that this life was over.” 
   
   Pripyat, after all, was an ideal place to live. One propaganda poster told residents, “Let the Atom be a Worker, not a Soldier.” The medians dividing fresh new streets were thickly planted with flowers. The towering apartment blocks were still unchipped. The bay cut into the Pripyat River was perfect for swimming in the summers and boating much of the rest of the year. The city hadn’t even had time to install the obligatory statue of Vladimir Lenin on the pedestal awaiting it in the central square. Everything was new and the future promising. 
   
   Twenty years before, this was a region of small and poor farming villages. By 1986, it housed the Soviet version of yuppies. Education levels were high. Wages were high. Parents videotaped kids’ parties, just as they would have in the United States. In those videos, the kids looked eerily similar to how they would have looked in Kansas City or Charlotte, from the style of their clothes and haircuts to their broad smiles and constant laughter. 
   
   So as the bus pulled out of town, heading toward Kiev 60 miles south, Sirota wasn’t worried. He and his mom were off to spend a couple of nights with his aunt. But he’d be back soon enough. 
   
   Those days became weeks, then months, then, after the studies were complete, the official verdict was that people could return to live in Pripyat in 3,000 years. 
   
   It became clear he’d left more than clothes and toys behind. He’d never been sick a day in his life before. He was proud of that. His mother bragged about that. 
   
   But he spent most of the rest of 1986 in the hospital. He would not be cured, however. Doctors would tell him it was psychosomatic, and the official Ukrainian medical diagnosis for many who complained of radiation-related illnesses after Chernobyl was “radiophobia.” The so-called “Chernobyl victims” were more afraid of what had happened than actually sick, went the official line. They should be fine, or at least suffering no more than anyone else. 
   
   Sirota would continue to return to the hospital for stays of a month or more every year, at least once, until recently. 
   
   “Who knows better what I need now than me?” he asks. “They give me the medicines and the needles. I take care of myself now.” 
   
   His eyes tear up, though, when he looks at photos of his mother’s beautiful hair. 
   
   “Most of her hair fell out,” he explains. “She cuts what’s left very short.” 
   
   [ Sektor 4 ] 
   
   Calling for help 
   
   Kopchinsky, the Soviet nuclear official, remembers the first phone call coming in at about 2 a.m. He was in Moscow at the time. 
   
   “Something had happened at Chernobyl, and it was something bad. That was what we knew.” 
   
   Immediately, calls went out for Soviet nuclear experts to gather in Moscow and discuss what to do next. At about the time the sun rose, he says, they got their first indication that “it was very serious.” By 11 a.m. they’d dispatched a planeload of scientists to the site to make a quick assessment. 
   
   Something had happened at Chernobyl, and it was something bad. That was what we knew. Georgi Kopchinsky, Soviet nuclear official 
   
   On the scene it was chaos, recalls Parashyn, the Chernobyl engineer. “We had no idea what we were looking at, the depth of the disaster, that first morning,” he says. “We had meetings, loud meetings, where we tried to figure it out.” 
   
   What they figured out was the worst nuclear-energy disaster in human history, far worse than the explosion at Kyshtym nuclear complex in 1957 in what was then the Soviet Union, which released 70 tons of radioactive material into the air, or the 1957 fire at the Windscale Nuclear Reactor in northwestern England, which forced a ban on milk sales for a month, or the Three Mile Island disaster in Pennsylvania on March 29, 1979, where a cooling malfunction led to a partial meltdown. 
   
   All of central and eastern Europe was at risk. Even today, in Bavaria in southern Germany, wildlife officials warn hunters not to eat the meat of wild boars, which continue to show high levels of radiation contamination. 
   
   Across Europe, children were advised to stay indoors that April and May. In East Berlin, shoppers were astonished to find grocery shelves teeming with fresh lettuce, which usually would have been sent across the wall for wealthier West Berliners. But West Berliners didn’t want the tainted stuff, so East Berlin had salad. 
   
   Chernobyl changed the way nuclear engineers viewed nuclear power. “Safety culture” – the idea that protecting the people and the environment should be emphasized over all other goals – became the watchword. 
   
   Helen Rycraft, a senior nuclear safety officer at the IAEA in Vienna, calls the Chernobyl accident as “a complete watershed.” 
   
   “The entire industry changed,” she says. 
   
   “Safety culture had not been properly instilled in nuclear power plants in the USSR prior to the Chernobyl accident,” the IAEA report concludes. “Many of its requirements seem to have existed in regulations, but these were not enforced. Many other necessary features did not exist at all. Local practices at nuclear plants, of which it may be assumed that practices at Chernobyl were typical, did not reflect a safety culture.” 
   
   After Chernobyl, Rycraft says, the regime of secrecy and competition that had been the norm among nuclear nations began to erode. “It taught us we need to learn from each other.” 
   
   “It was the first major accident where organizational issues were identified as a key factor,” she says. “The Soviets called safety culture ‘the ghost in the machine.’ It’s the healthy questioning behind every aspect, every detail, of a nuclear program.” 
   
   [Sektor 5] 
   
   Life in the exclusion zone today 
   
   Despite the health problems, Pripyat remained a fundamental part of Sirota’s dreams. He would next see the city six years later, in 1992. He and a friend sneaked in to take a look around at their old home. He remembers being most surprised by the fact that very little had changed. 
   
   They’d been told to leave their furniture and most of their clothes behind because officials knew it would all be radioactive. Special teams had come and emptied the contents of the apartments into the streets to be burned, and buried. 
   
   But poor and opportunistic Ukrainians had arrived to pick through their belongings before they were destroyed. They found a city filled with treasures, often guarded by nothing more than a threat that seemed less real than a free couch, refrigerator or wardrobe of clothes. 
   
   When he recounts what happened 30 years ago, Sirota can vividly recall the details, not because they were wildly dramatic, but because on his visit to his home nothing looked out of place. Windows hadn’t shattered in a nuclear wind. Foundations hadn’t shaken from exploding atoms. The earth didn’t bake in escaping radioactivity. 
   
   They say it’s just the warm water that gets them so big. But I don’t think you should eat the fish. Alexandr Sirota 
   
   Yet what had been a perfect childhood, in what seemed like a perfect town, and in what they were told was on the edge of a perfect future, had ended, abruptly. 
   
   Sirota had hoped beyond reason to gain it back when a few years ago he bought a small house at the end of a gravel lane just outside the the exclusion zone imposed around the old reactor. Move the modest but sturdy house across the pasture and it would be inside an area identified as unsafe for human habitation for the next 3,000 years. 
   
   There are several reasons he moved back to the area. For one, his house, on a decent plot of land, cost the equivalent of just $125. Even in poor rural Ukraine, that’s cheap. 
   
   It would be even cheaper inside the exclusion zone. Ukrainian officials are known to have turned a blind eye to a small group of very poor, and illegal, residents who returned to the homes standing inside the forbidden zone. Officials estimate that 197 squatters hide there. And for short spells, workers can live inside the zone. There’s even a hotel for overnight visits. 
   
   The wildlife is tough to beat. Wolves and bears and big cats, even wild horses, thrive inside the perimeter. In a field across the road from Sirota’s house, he points to the wild Przewalski’s horses. Originally from Central Asia, they’re endangered, wiped out in many of their former ranges. They seem to thrive around his house. 
   
   Still, he’s painfully aware that the radiation settled into the soil, from which it’s drawn into the roots of trees and grass and mushrooms. 
   
   “I don’t eat the mushrooms from here,” he says. “I avoid eating the game. That’s what they tell us: We’re safe as long as we don’t.” 
   
   But many do. At the tiny grocery in his 600-resident village of Dytyatky, he points out a freezer of local cuts of meat. The cuts are roughly done, uneven, hunters’ cuts of meat, not a butcher’s clean, even meat packages. 
   
   When 70-year-old Maria is asked whether she worries about the health risks of food coming from so close to Chernobyl, she waves a hand and spits: “Ach, radiation. I can’t see it. Why should I worry?” 
   
   Sirota worries, but he’s drawn to this place. He lives with a Geiger counter around his neck. He carries a second one in case the first malfunctions. 
   
   The constant clicking as the Geiger counter measures the local radiation serves as a soundtrack to his life. The faster the clicking, the higher the radiation levels. When the clicking goes into overdrive, he moves on, to find a place where the levels are safer. 
   
   Even at home, resting or cooking, the clicking is constant, click . . . click . . .click. 
   
   His work these days is showing visitors around the irradiated area. A couple of days a week he passes through the heavily guarded gates into the contaminated zone. It’s how he earns a living. 
   
   “People want to see this,” he explains. “I can understand the curiosity, but there isn’t much to see.” 
   
   Then, in what used to be the plant’s lagoon running along the edge of the Pripyat River, he shows off the 9-foot-long catfish. In the summer, he’ll toss loaves of bread and watch their long bodies spiral over one another in the muddy water as they dine. 
   
   “They say it’s just the warm water that gets them so big,” he explains. “But I don’t think you should eat the fish.” 
   
   His Geiger counter has gone from fast clicks to a solid buzz (clickclickclickclick). 
   
   [Sektor 6] 
   
   A million years of problems 
   
   When the steam burst through the roof of Reactor Number 4 in 1986, it took with it 5 percent of the enriched uranium. That means 10 tons vanished. It also means 95 percent, or 190 tons, remained. They’re still there. 
   
   After the blasted reactor partially collapsed into the nuclear material, it created a radioactive blob of uranium, concrete, steel and assorted junk weighing about 2,000 tons. Ideally, Ukraine would remove the material. Sergiy Parashyn grabs a pen and paper as he talks about the problems with that. 
   
   “We do not know how to do this,” he explains. “We do not have the technology to do this. It must be something new.” 
   
   He sketches the blob, then makes a quick drawing of a tractor with a scoop on one side and a large rotating blade on the other. He smiles at the crude drawing, then shrugs. 
   
   “One problem is that the material is decaying and is brittle, and when we cut it up to transport it to disposal bins, it will very likely fill the air with radioactive dust,” he explains. So the tractor has to be able to operate in a radioactive environment, it has to be able to control and eliminate any dust and it has to operate in an area that will not be at all safe for humans. “Maybe something like this would work, maybe it wouldn’t. We don’t know. That’s a problem.” 
   
   It’s a problem because while 5 percent of the radioactive material caused problems that continue 30 years later and will continue to cause problems for eons to come, the other 95 percent of the material could represent about 20 times the problems. 
   
   For instance, if mistakes are made and the brittle material is released into the atmosphere, they’re back to square one. If the material gets into the Pripyat River, it will flow into the Dnieper River. The Dnieper River is the water source for Kiev. The Dnieper is the primary water source for much of Ukraine. 
   
   Clearly, nothing man made is more than temporary, and therefore it isn’t adequate. Detlef Appel, geologist 
   
   This is why Ukrainian officials are counting on what they call a sarcophagus to contain the site, a massive structure that looks like a Quonset hut being assembled behind a wall that is intended to deflect radiation from the decaying plant from workers. 
   
   When finished, it will be rolled across the crumbling concrete of the surrounding ground to cover and further seal the dangerous reactor. The work is expected to be completed in 2018, though that is just a guess. It’s expected to last 100 years. It’s not nearly long enough. 
   
   Reactor Number 4 today is essentially an unplanned nuclear-waste dump. To serve in that role requires it to last for 3,000 years. That means the area surrounding Chernobyl will be safe to inhabit by people again in the year 4986. 
   
   How likely is that? To get an idea of what it means to contain and control a deadly and potentially devastating radioactive pile in Ukraine for 3,000 years, consider what the world looked like 3,000 years ago: 
   
   The Iron Age was beginning. The Trojan War was fairly recent news. Egypt had Pharaohs. King David was succeeded by his son, Solomon. Canaanites were the big world traders. Christ was 1,000 years from showing up. Muhammad was 1,500 years away. 
   
   The legendary founding of Rome, of Romulus and Remus and the wolf, wouldn’t take place for 300 years. 
   
   It’s not simply that a lot has changed in the last 3,000 years, it’s that almost everything has. 
   
   And yet, Detlef Appel, a geologist who runs PanGeo, a Hamburg, Germany, company that consults on such nuclear storage issues, notes that 3,000 years probably isn’t long enough. He suggests that truly safe radioactive waste storage needs to extend a million years into the future. Think back to when man’s earliest relative began to walk the Earth. 
   
   “We can trust human endeavor, perhaps, for a few hundred years, though that is doubtful,” he said. “Storage implies a way to retrieve the materials. It requires trained personnel, maintenance, updating and security. Clearly, nothing man made is more than temporary, and therefore it isn’t adequate.” 
   
   Even the continents will have moved in a million years. 
   
   Tetiana Verbytska, an energy policy expert at the National Ecological Center of Ukraine, worries that people are far too easygoing about Chernobyl. Among government officials right now, mindful of the 30-year anniversary, there is a movement to shrink the radius of the highly contaminated no man’s land from 18 miles to 6. 
   
   “The move to reduce the highly contaminated zone has nothing to do with science and everything to do with public relations,” she says. “In Ukraine, each April we make wonderful speeches about our commitment to dealing with this problem, and the rest of each year we hope the problem will just go away.” 
   
   There are other reasons to worry. Ukraine is creaking under a civil war against insurgents backed by Russia and scraping by with an economy that in the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union has been looted by a series of oligarchs. It doesn’t have the money to fund an educational system that can be expected to create legions of top scientists and engineers. 
   
   Officials speak very proudly of the new sarcophagus roof that is being put into place. But the finish date on that has been repeatedly backed up, and there’s no guarantee that its 2018 date won’t be moved again. 
   
   A variety of disasters could still strike. The site’s existing covering, built in haste after the accident, could collapse, shattering the brittle mix of radioactive materials below and sending nuclear dust into the atmosphere to mix with rain. There could be an earthquake. The entire site is fragile. 
   
   Olga Kosharna, the lead scientist at the Ukrainian Department of Energy and Nuclear Safety in Kiev who oversaw safety at Chernobyl in the 1990s, recalls walking the roof above the shattered reactor and being horrified to find holes that had been burned through the concrete. 
   
   The shoes she wore that day were highly contaminated and had to be destroyed. 
   
   Alexandre Polack, a spokesman for the European Union, notes in an email that the date to begin removing radioactive material from the site is still 20 to 30 years away. “The current shelter covering destroyed Reactor 4 was reinforced in recent years and seems stable,” he writes. “However it was built in haste after the accident and never intended as a long-term solution.” 
   
   Verbytska emphasizes that the mass of uranium debris inside Reactor Number 4 is now a mess that goes beyond human ability to clean up. Others dismiss the situation as a problem, but one that technology can fix. 
   
   “We don’t have the technology to fix the problem,” she says. “We don’t have the process to develop the technology to fix the problem, and we don’t have the money to support the process to develop the technology to fix the problem. The solutions for our Chernobyl problems are very much ‘seal it for now.’ We will have smart children and smart grandchildren who in 100 years or so will figure out what to do.” 
   
   [Sektor 7] 
   
   A modern Pompeii 
   
   After the disaster, radiation burned off the tops of the trees. Soviet officials ordered the trees cut down and buried deep. But they failed to properly encase the buried wood. As a new forest grew unchecked above the radioactive remains of the old forest, the new wood was also highly radioactive. The whole thing will have to be dug up and encased and buried again, properly. 
   
   Still, Sirota burns it for warmth, though he acknowledges that is probably unsafe. 
   
   Sirota’s tour takes him across the Bridge of Death, which looks just as remote and harmless today as it did to him that morning, and on into Pripyat, which remains a modern Pompeii, a city abandoned in an instant, the trappings of what had been daily life left where they lay. 
   
   The difference is that while Pompeii is carefully managed for tourists, Pripyat is still very much an outlier on the tourist map: perhaps Pompeii were Vesuvius still erupting. 
   
   The roads remain wide, though they’re overgrown today, vividly, eerily green. Trees grow out of old manholes, and through cracks in the old parade ground. The lichen on the trees is long, spindly, beautiful and eerie. There is a plastic baby doll in the doorway of an old administrative building. Sirota notes the doll is clearly Western in style and that it appears to have been left by a photographer trying to add emotional impact, to conjure memories of the children who once lived and played here. 
   
   “If you need to see the children who were once here, I’m here,” he explains. 
   
   In his old school, a textbook remains on a desk. It is open to pages decorated with drawings of missiles and tanks and warplanes, the Cyrillic words reminding readers, “The stars of the Kremlin shine everywhere. . . . The children have a beautiful homeland. A better one does not exist.” 
   
   Sirota’s eyes often develop red rims as he talks about his old home, though he wipes away the tears before they run down his cheeks. 
   
   “Obviously, I’m drawn to Chernobyl,” he explains. “It’s the source of the greatest sadness of my life, but that’s also because it was the source of my greatest joy. I feel that the accident at the plant stole a perfect childhood, a perfect life, from me. I know this isn’t rational, but I stay here, hoping that someday I might get it back.” ||||| Chernobyl's exclusion zone to be revived with solar 
   
   The Ukrainian government has announced plans to use Chernobyl's nuclear wasteland for solar energy generation. Meanwhile in Belarus, a 22.3 MW PV plant is already under construction in Brahin district, around 20 miles from Chernobyl. 
   
   Flickr/thisisbossi One time European PV power plant leader, Ukraine is turning back to solar in unlikely places. 
   
   30 years after the Chernobyl accident, the Ukrainian government aims to give a new renewable life to thousands hectares of the exclusion zone in the northern part of the country. While long-lasting radiation makes the area unfit for human habitation, agriculture or forestry, its cheap land and remaining electric transmission facilities can be used for solar power generation. 
   
   “Land and transmission line connection are the most expensive parts of any solar project, and we have both of them here,” general director of the Chernobyl plant Igor Gramotkin told local news outlets in April, when the country was commemorating the 30th anniversary of the nuclear disaster. 
   
   At the end of June, Ukraine's minister of the environment and natural resources Ostap Semerak presented country's plans for the revival of the exclusion zone at Canada-Ukraine Business Forum in Toronto. After the forum, he announced that a number of Canadian investors are looking at developing solar and biofuel power plants near Chernobyl. 
   
   Semerak also noted that the implementation of such projects requires new legislation in terms of allocation of land in the exclusion zone. “We expect that this issue will be fully settled by the end of the current session of Parliament. In early June, the corresponding bill already passed a first reading,” the minister said. 
   
   In a recent interview Semerak has confirmed that the ministry of environmental and natural resources was already negotiating with two U.S. investment firms and four Canadian energy companies interested in the Chernobyl's solar potential. Ukrainian developers plan to install a 4 MW project at the site by the end of the year, Bloomberg reports. 
   
   According to the ministry of environmental and natural resources, 34 solar power plants with the total capacity of over 120 MW are scheduled to be completed in Ukraine in 2016. Despite the political and economic difficulties facing the country, Ukraine is aiming to increase the share of renewables in its energy mix up to 11% by 2020, the ministry reports. 
   
   As recent developments demonstrate, after several years of stagnation, international solar developers have begun showing renewed interest in Ukraine. Yesterday, a 4 MW PV plant was successfully connected to the grid in Vysokopillya, a southern part of the country. According to the developer, the German-based Work Team, heavy rainfall, snow, and freezing rain have frequently posed challenges for solar developers in the area. China-based PV-inverter manufacturer Sungrow supplied its SG60KTL inverters for the PV plant. 
   
   Belarus' PV plan for Chernobyl 
   
   Belarus, Ukraine's northern neighbor, has its own solar plans for the land affected by the Chernobyl disaster. In April this year, the telecommunications company Velcom, a subsidiary of the Austrian company Telecom, announced an investment of more than €23 million ($ 25.3 million) for a 22.3 MW PV plant in Brahin district, located at the Ukrainian border, next to the nuclear wasteland. 
   
   Velcom is planning to sell the generated electricity, as well as use it for the company's needs. “We expect the solar plant to cover about 50% of the company's energy needs and pay itself off in four to five years”, Velcom CEO Helmut Duhs said at a press-conference in Minsk. He added that the company had chosen this particular area not only because of its southern location but also because of the cheap price land prices. 
   
   According to the company, the solar facility in Brahin district will be comprised of 85,000 PV panels installed across the area of 56 hectares. The construction works are scheduled to be completed by the end of this summer.
target: – If anything, the land in the 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone left largely untouched since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 is cheap. After all, studies suggest it won't be inhabitable until the year 4986, reported McClatchy DC in April, and pretty much nothing can be harvested from it. But now Ostap Semerak, Ukraine's environment minister, is drumming up foreign interest in solar power projects across the wasteland, which he says is uniquely, if a bit ironically, suited to renewables, reports Bloomberg. PV Magazine reports that Igor Gramotkin, today the general director of the Chernobyl plant, in April pointed out that "land and transmission line connection" are the most expensive elements of a solar undertaking. Lucky then, that "we already have high-voltage transmission lines that were previously used for the nuclear stations," says Semerak. "And we have many people trained to work at power plants" (thousands still work at Chernobyl). Plus there's all that inexpensive land. Ukraine's interest in renewables is partly politically motivated given the fragile cease-fire with Kremlin-backed rebels near the Russian border, not to mention increasing friction with the Putin camp over natural gas bills. Semerak says four energy companies from Canada and two investment firms from the US have expressed interest in a solar complex at the Chernobyl site, while Ukrainian developers intend to install panels there before 2016 is through. (Apparently human habitation is worse for wildlife than radiation, according to this exclusion-zone activity.)