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RADIATION DETECTOR CLICKS AND BEEPS
Wow.
SIREN WAILS
When the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor exploded in 1986,
it changed Everything.
I was 13 years old
and it was just when I was starting to understand the world.
And Chernobyl for me was such a massive
punctuation mark.
Now, 35 years after the disaster,
I'm travelling to the most radioactive place on Earth.
This is the accident and emergency department.
Imagine the horrors that went on in here.
I've been granted special permission
to explore some of Chernobyl's secrets...
Some people believe this was a mind controller, like a brain scorcher.
..going inside the very control room where the fatal mistake was made...
Goodness me.
I mean, this is unbelievable.
..and seeing close-up the tomb of the doomed reactor.
Wow. I can't quite believe I'm actually in here.
What has Chernobyl now become?
Oh, look.
So, someone's been staying in here.
This is the Chernobyl squatter.
And what does it mean for the generations to come?
I see this as a very timely visit.
Because the world is at tipping point.
I'm hoping that by visiting this place, the people,
maybe I'll find some hope that all is not lost.
I'm on my way to the scene of the world's worst nuclear accident.
So, this road doesn't lead anywhere but into the Restricted Zone now?
We call it simply The Zone. The Zone, yes.
Where I'm going, I have to be accompanied
by a government sanctioned expert.
Nikolai Fomin has in-depth knowledge of the risks.
So this is the checkpoint?
Still pretty highly militarised area so please prepare your documents.
Beyond this border crossing is the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone,
a region so contaminated
it was closed off from the rest of the world for over a decade.
It feels quite strange. It's heavily militarised,
there's load of police and it's heavily controlled
in terms of who can go in and even who can go out.
From now on, the law dictates that the increased radiation
I'm about to experience must be continually monitored.
I've got the meter for you. The dosimeter.Yeah.
This is the device that measures your total radiation exposure,
your dose. So this I have to wear around my neck? Yes.
And this is the Geiger counter. Yeah.
These units measure radiation level.
It's never zero, right? So there is always a little bit of background
radiation all over the world.
So right now we are measuring 0.13 microsieverts per hour.
If radiation levels exceed normal reading, it will go off.
It will start flashing red, it will start beeping
so you'll never miss that. OK, we're good to go.
Two worlds. I'm about to step over the threshold.
I'll be spending a week living inside the Exclusion Zone,
which covers an area of more than 1,000 square miles -
larger than Luxembourg.
The Zone was established in the aftermath of the worst
nuclear disaster in history.
On April 26th 1986,
Chernobyl's reactor No 4 exploded.
The resulting fire lasted ten days, releasing 400 times as much
radioactive material as the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The entire civilian population in the surrounding towns
and villages was forcibly evacuated,
later told never to return.
Are these radiation signs? Yes, they are.
Stay away from the warning signs
and from now on don't touch anything.
I'll be going inside the stricken power plant itself,
but first I want to visit the ghost of Chernobyl.
We're in the city now. Yes, we're in Pripyat.
In front of us is main street of Pripyat.
This is the main street? This is the main street.
So, everything, all these trees, this has all grown
since it was abandoned?Yeah.
Pripyat was still being constructed when its 48,000 residents all left.
It was designed to be the model socialist city, a Soviet Utopia.
Never really seen anything like it.
I've Been to war zones, I've seen places that have, you know,
experienced great upheaval and changes but never quite like this.
I'm imagining mums and their pushchairs and children squealing.
You know, a bustling place.
And now look at it.
I was expecting to see a few derelict buildings but not this.
This is not even a town.
This is an entire city, with five secondary schools,
two sports stadiums and its own Palace of Culture,
all left to ruin and consumed by nature.
That's incredible, I'm on a multistorey school building
and there's trees growing through the floor.
I do feel like I've gone back in time.
To me, that looks like sort of dosimetry to test for radiation.
The great irony is that everyone here was preparing for
a nuclear catastrophe
that came from the other side of the Atlantic that would
come in the form of a bomb, not in the form of their own power station.
Wow.
Iconic, poignant.
It's kind of everything, this.
Cos this was the theme park that never was.
The abandoned city of Pripyat is unlike anywhere I've ever been.
Life changed here forever
a day after the world's worst nuclear disaster.
By all accounts Pripyat had been a happy, thriving city,
full of the hopes and dreams of a young population.
The average age was 26.
It was built just 3km from the Chernobyl Power Plant
for workers and their families,
with brand-new facilities to rival the West.
Wow.
WHISTLE PEEPS
CHEERING
Back in 1986 this was state of the art in the USSR.
This was unheard of cos Pripyat, this was a model town, a model city.
I suppose the comparison in the United Kingdom is Milton Keynes.
You know, this was built for purpose and the living standards here
were far better than anywhere else in the Soviet Union.
It makes me smile more in here than other places,
with an air sadness as well
cos there would have been so many happy times that people had in here.
The Chernobyl No 4 reactor
exploded in the early hours of April 26th, 1986.
When Pripyat awoke,
toxic levels of radiation were already engulfing the area.
But no warning was given. People continued their lives as normal.
Alexander Sirota was a nine-year-old schoolboy at the time.
So, what are your memories from the 26th of April 1986?
So this is the school here?
Right through here?Yes.
This is You?Yes. This is poignant.
Wow.
Alexander was sent back to school,
despite the fact that radiation levels in the city
had reached alarming levels. Incredibly, the Soviet authorities
waited 36 hours before starting an evacuation.
Can I ask if you or your family
suffered long-term health implications?
I-I really can't even imagine what he went through.
That 36 hour delay, so much is made about that.
Without doubt,
that cost people their health and probably their lives.
The Soviet Union did not want to admit, it was embarrassing,
it wasn't... It wasn't Soviet.
You know, a reactor couldn't explode, there was disbelief
but there was also denial and denial cost lives.
By the afternoon, confusion had descended on Pripyat.
No official information was being provided
other than a small fire on the roof of the power plant.
But there was one place in the city that had already been a witness
to the terrifying events that were unfolding.
Oh, hello, we've got company.
In my mind this is one of the most significant buildings, really,
in Pripyat cos this is the hospital, Hospital 126.
Everyone who went to the plant that night to fight the little fire
on the roof that we now know was this...
..this world-shattering explosion...
..would have been taken in this door.
Remember to just not touch stuff, yeah.
In the hours after the explosion, 108 firefighters and plant workers,
suffering from acute radiation sickness,
were taken through these corridors.
This is the accident and emergency department.
I'm trying to imagine the chaos and but also the unknown, really.
No-one really knew why all these firefighters were coming
and why they were vomiting.
The contamination they left is still a danger today.
That's the reason I've got a mask on right now, all those dust particles.
Don't really want those going into my nose and mouth.
Cos this is one of the most radioactive parts of Pripyat.
All the first responders were heavily radioactive
from fighting those fires.
Anyone exposed to radiation at the power plant should have been washed
and dressed in uncontaminated clothing before they arrived here.
That never happen.
This is kind of strange.
There are still the rags that the nurses were using on the firemen.
If I use my dosimeter that is picking up beta...
BEEPING AND CLICKING
It's already gone the highest it's been.
The reading is 60 times higher
than the average background radiation just outside The Zone.
I'm not going to spend very long in here.
I'm obviously being very sensible.
But it's the invisibility of the radiation that they would have had
as well, they wouldn't have had a clue. They didn't have these.
These were just firemen who had burns
and unknown symptoms that caused vomiting.
28 people brought to this hospital after the explosion
lost their lives within three months.
It's unclear how many would later suffer ill health as a result
of their exposure to radiation that night.
I think of all the buildings I've been into in Pripyat,
this is...the most chilling, most haunting.
Imagine the horrors that went on in here,
the number of lives that were lost
cos this was a town of 48,000 people.
In fact, they called it a city.
So there would have been many, many pregnant women, lots of newborns.
And just 36 hours after the accident
this, along with the whole city, was evacuated.
A whole working hospital, gone.
Look at it now.
I've been told that beneath this pile of rather innocent-looking sand
is the entrance to the basement,
one of the most toxic parts of the whole Chernobyl.
All of the uniforms from the first responders, the firefighters -
so their boots, their tunics their hats - was taken down
into the basement where it was left
because they were so toxic, so radioactive,
they couldn't let anyone go near it.
The basement was only sealed a few years ago to stop trespassers
intent on venturing into one of Chernobyl's deadliest sites.
Nikolai wants to show me some footage
of what's actually down there.
This is the basement of the hospital before it was buried. Mm-hm.
Levels of radiation there are insanely high.
72... 700. 720... That's off the scale now, you see.
And that's a pair of fireman's boots.
The main risk is not even the dose of radiation you obtained there,
it's dust. All those tiny partials of radioactive material,
if you ingest any of those, even the microscopic ones you cannot see,
they are capable of killing human beings.
Are these authorised individuals?
No, I'm pretty sure they are trespassers.
Cos it's strictly forbidden to go there.
Although in recent years authorities have allowed some
very strictly controlled tours inside the wider Zone area...
..illegal thrill-seekers, driven largely by social media,
continue to be a problem here.
I think these guys are doing it for adrenaline, attention...
Showing off. ..social media, showing off.
That's what drives people to take the risk and go down there.
What about the firemen's helmets, are they down there?
There was one helmet that somebody took from the basement
and put on the ground floor of the hospital building in Pripyat.
That was in front of the main entrance for years.
Now it's gone. Somebody took it.
So somewhere out there is a highly radioactive fireman's helmet?
Yeah, and I hope that's within The Zone.
I really hope they didn't take it out
because that's the worst case scenario.
Cos if you take something radioactive from here,
it can cause a lot of trouble.
Radiation has no taste, it's invisible, you can't see it,
you can't smell it.
The levels of radiation in the uniforms are a sobering reminder
of just how toxic some parts of The Zone still are.
Scientists predict the Chernobyl reactor site will be uninhabitable
for at least 20,000 years.
Containing the disaster is ongoing.
Almost 3,000 people still work at the power plant.
No-one can stay within 10km of the site
and for some workers this is a way of life.
So you do this everyday, basically, when you go into the Control Zone.
Clean.
This just analyses what I've got on me, if I'm contaminated or not.
That says I'm clean. It's good news.
I'm spending my first night at one of the few lodgings in The Zone.
Yes, of course.
BEEPING
OK.
OK. Over here?
VOICEOVER: To limit my dose of radiation,
I'm only allowed to stay in The Zone for up to 14 days at a time.
Wow.
It's actually a lot more comfortable than I thought this was going to be.
But it is very weird that I am just a few of kilometres
from the Chernobyl that I remember melting down
when I was a 13-year-old. And here I am, about to have my first night.
And I've even got a memory of home. That's nice.
I've been advised that boots should maybe be left outside
just because they've been touching dirt and dust that might be
a little bit more radioactive than anything else.
So these need to be left outside.
The invisible threat of radiation is ever present in The Zone.
Tomorrow, I'm going to the very heart of where it all started.
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a strange and unsettling place,
filled with haunting human stories of a paradise lost.
I want to get closer to the events that actually unfolded
in the early hours of April 26th 1986,
and so that can only lead me to one place.
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant itself.
This, back in 1986, was ground zero.
When the roof blew off
that was one of the things that we were most fearful of.
Thousands of miles away in the UK, I remember being terrified of it.
What happens if that reached me?
Now I'm here.
I'm...going to go in there.
How mad is that?
An enormous steel arch now shields the highly radioactive remains
of Chernobyl's doomed No 4 reactor unit.
I've been given permission to go inside the actual control room
where the disaster unfolded,
which for decades has been completely off limits.
I'm heading into the inner workings of Chernobyl.
So, you have to make sure there is nothing that can be contaminated
so the only thing that I'm wearing of my own is my pants.
They may need to be changed after this.
Are we ready?I think so.
From now on we have to move quickly.
The power plant is vast
and my permitted dose of radiation strictly controlled.
This is pretty extraordinary, this, to...
..be given access into the
workings of Chernobyl.
Pretty amazing.
Lots of activity here, there's lots of people working here,
obviously, ensuring that it's safe.
Wow, it's endless.
The 800-metre so-called golden corridor
links what remains of Chernobyl's reactor 4
to its three other reactors,
which were largely undamaged in the explosion.
So that says Control Room 1? Yes.So that's in there.
I'll only have a very limited and restricted time
inside the heavily contaminated shell of Control Room 4.
So, engineer Valerii Kulishenko
first takes me to see what it WOULD have looked like.
Feels like going back in time now. So, this is the control room
of reactor No 3,
the sister reactor to the one that exploded.
On the night of the accident,
up the corridor in Control Room Number 4,
engineers were carrying out complex reactor tests
that were spiralling out of control.
As an exact mirror to Control Room Number 4,
this was the button that doomed Chernobyl.
This unprecedented chain of events had begun,
and the final decision was made to shut it down.
The button was turned...
..and that was it. Disaster.
The shutdown triggered a massive power surge.
Oh, my goodness.
The core overheated and, seconds later, the first explosion,
followed soon after by a second.
This is truly extraordinary.
I am standing on reactor No 3.
So, each of these is a fuel rod.
1,661 to be exact.
This is an exact mirror of reactor No 4.
This blew right through the ceiling. Everything came off.
This is what people thought was impossible.
But what you must remember is we're talking 1986.
That was when nuclear energy was in its infancy, it was transitioning
from weapon to source of power
and the USSR were producing these power stations
faster than anyone else,
but they were also cutting corners.
These reactors weren't designed with a concrete and steel dome
to contain the radiation.
Two engineers were killed instantly in the explosion
while the night shift in Control Room Number 4
were exposed to lethal levels of radiation.
So, there's a little hatch here.
It looks like I'm going to be given another dosimeter.
Kind of shows that I'm now heading into a more vulnerable part
of Chernobyl. There's much higher radiation where we're going now.
I'm now heading into the heart of the Chernobyl story...
Through here?
..where many of the decisions and actions that led to the disaster
played out.
So, this door goes into Control Room Number 4?
I mean, this is pretty extraordinary because beyond this door
is a control room that changed the world.
I mean, this is unbelievable.
Goodness me.
I don't have long to take it in.
Five minutes to absorb all of this. Wow.
In terms of places of historical significance this is right up there
because, arguably, this was the location
of the world's greatest mistake.
Oh, my goodness. It's a time capsule.
Lots of things have been removed. Where are they?
Stolen over the years.
It's hard to even imagine the terrifying events
that took place here.
The panic, the fear, the horrific effects of radiation.
The reading is pretty high in here. It's about as high
as I've seen during my whole time around Chernobyl.
But what a profound, extraordinary, moving place.
I mean, look at this.
Soviet authorities blamed the disaster on an inexperienced
night shift failing to follow safety protocols.
But was it human error, flaws in the design
or was the Soviet nuclear programme's technology
just unstable?
Time, we have to go.
Then my time was up.
OK, we gotta go.
I doubt I'll ever come back into here but, wow, what an experience.
It's a reminder, I suppose, of our mortality.
I'll be returning to the power plant later in my journey
to see something perhaps even more extraordinary -
the tomb of the doomed reactor, deeper inside the huge steal arch.
There are very few people who witnessed first-hand
the events of that night and lived to tell their story.
I'm returning to the ghost town of Pripyat
to meet one person that did...
So, this is the police station?
..a former policeman called Alexey Moskalenko.
Alexey was a 29-year-old officer with a young family
when the disaster happened.
Incredibly, he was on patrol directly outside the power station
when reactor 4 exploded.
Despite his injuries, long after his own family had been evacuated,
Alexey stayed on in Pripyat to police the enormous,
life-threatening clean-up operation.
Where are we going now?
So this, this is the claw?
Apparently, this grappling claw was attached to a crane
and used to handle large chunks
of ultra-radioactive graphite ejected by the explosion.
Does that not mean that this is highly radioactive?
BEEPING AND CLICKING
OK. I don't want you to overdo it!
That was as high as I've seen it.
Toxic debris was scattered all over the roof of reactor 3,
spewing out lethal doses of radiation.
Attempts to use robots to clear the area failed
so another method was needed.
The army of people drafted in for the deadly task
became known as the liquidators.
Every shovel they used
and every item of makeshift protective clothing they wore
had to be safely disposed of after each potentially fatal mission.
Thousands of liquidators are thought to have died
as a result of exposure to radiation.
Do you think people sacrificed their lives because they had to
or did they do it for their country?
Did you... Did you sacrifice your health?
You were given five years.
It's just incredible,
I mean, to meet someone who not only experienced it first-hand
but came back, was given five years to live.
I-I really can't even imagine what he went through.
It was just a duty of humanity.
So, what he did with arguably for all of us, really,
to help contain it and that's what the liquidator's did
and they are the unsung heroes of this whole sorry story.
Cleared by the liquidators as best they could,
deep in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone
it's still referred to as a toxic dead zone.
But just how true is that? Tomorrow I'm going somewhere
that might well turn everything on its head.
Could people actually still be living here?
DOG BARKS
My Exclusion Zone lodgings are in the tiny town of Chernobyl,
after which the power plant itself was named.
Still inside The Zone, it was also evacuated but, being 14km away,
didn't suffer the total abandonment seen in Pripyat.
It has a very strange feel here.
It feels like we're the only people here.
Showing me around is Kate Goncharenko,
whose father and grandparents were forcibly relocated
after the accident.
This looks like it's a working building over here.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. This is the post office, of Chernobyl town.
And, generally, the one post office for the whole area.
And above the window you can see the screen.
Usually, when we see such a screen in a post office, we expect to see
the time there but as long as we're in the Exclusion Zone
we see the level of radiation
in the different parts of the Exclusion Zone.
That's kind of mad.
So, basically, what my little dosimeter is doing here...Yeah.
..that's telling me every single part and region
of the entire Exclusion Zone. Exactly, you're getting it right.
No-one is allowed to stay here for more than two weeks at a time,
but there is a local shop.
This is a proper supermarket. Hello.Hello.
You've got everything you can need - knives, biscuits, a lot of alcohol.
Yeah.
Do you just come here for two weeks at a time?
How do you feel working here?
I think I'm going to get myself a little something sweet.
Do you fancy anything, Kate? I guess one of this.Yeah.Yeah.
I love that she's using an abacus. Yeah.
Like stepping back in time.
26.Thank you.
Thank you so much, bye-bye. Bye-bye.
It's against the law to live inside The Zone
but Kate is taking me to the crumbling outskirts of Chernobyl
to meet one woman who is defying the authorities.
Look at all these derelict houses here.
This is the house of Valentina, one of the re-settlers,
the people who came back and continued living in their homes.
Let's go.
Oh, look she's got a cat.Yeah.
I didn't really that there were re-settlers, as in people
who moved back here permanently.
Still feels like this is a dead zone.
You know, the fact that I'm walking around with this,
monitoring the amount of radioactivity that I'm absorbing,
but Valentina lives here.
It's kind of quite a lot to get your head around.
Shall we?Yes.
Thank you very much for letting me come into your house.
Valentina moved back to The Zone soon after the disaster.
Her late husband found work here as a liquidator.
Hello, little dog. Who ate all the pies?
Valentina, what is your dog called?
Dana. I can't quite work it out.
It's like a Chihuahua-Corgi cross.
There's lots of bottles of water. Do you drink from the tap?
Valentina does have electricity and friends bring food in from outside
but it's a humble existence.
So, Valentina, why did you choose
to return to a place so close to Chernobyl Power Station?
Does it ever feel sad here or lonely here?
Will you ever leave here?
Around 200 re-settlers still live in The Zone,
one of the most toxic places on Earth.
Already they've lived longer on average
than those who never returned.
She also offers us some vodka.
When in Ukraine, I feel I must take a bit of vodka.
These labels look a little bit scary.
Isn't that for electricity? Electricity, yeah.
VOICEOVER: I think Valentina is keen to show me that there can be
a kind of normality here.
Is this Ukrainian hospitality? Exactly.
My goodness. That's quite a lot. Is she trying to get me drunk?
Exactly. Thank you very much. How do we say cheers in Ukrainian?
Budmo.Budmo. OK.
Whoa.
Wow. You should eat something. Oh, should I eat something as well?
Yeah.I think I need to. That was quite strong.
Thank you.
Valentina has one more treat for me...
Is this the entertainment?
..ably assisted by Dana.
DANA HOWLS REPEATEDLY
DANA HOWLS CONTINUOUSLY, BEN LAUGHS
Valentina, that...
That... I will never forget that.
DANA BARKS
Take Care. Thank you.
That was kind of amazing.
So much love and humour and humanity and normalness.
And then this, which is kind of what people expect to see in Chernobyl -
abandonment and derelict buildings.
It's kind of a tale of two worlds, isn't it?
And it's just completely unexpected, that.
Because that's such a sign of kind of hope and beauty
amidst such wretchedness. Kind of flips it all on its head.
Self-settlers like Valentina show that life can still exist here,
but I'm learning of a newer generation who also want to connect
to this strange place.
This evening I'm returning to the ghost town of Pripyat.
No-one can enter here without a government permit.
But not everyone heeds the rules.
What I've slowly realised being here is that
although it is a deserted city, stuff still happens here,
and police patrols are one of the realities
because a deserted city attracts people for the wrong reason.
And I'm curious to find out what sort of people do come here and why.
Ukrainian police carry out 24-hour surveillance of Pripyat.
Officer Mykhailo Kuzmenko and his team are on the night shift.
What kind of things do people get up to here?
The illegal trespassers are known as stalkers.
They operate in groups,
creating makeshift living quarters inside buildings...
..and even sleeping there.
Stalkers seek out the most dangerous and inaccessible places...
..to get their thrills.
The dangers are clearly massive.
RAPID BEEPING
Tonight, Mykhailo's team believe some have been staying in
a high-rise on the outskirts of the city.
Going in.
This is so strange.
Kind of going from apartment to apartment...looking for people.
People have been graffitiing here.
They're pretty certain that there is someone around.
There's fresh footprints,
fresh signs of people being here.
Look.
So someone's been staying in here?
This is the Chernobyl squatter.
Who'd have thought?
It's a side to Chernobyl I never even considered,
that people would be attracted here for the thrill of staying over.
I mean, pretty astonishing views. I'm drawn to the window. Wow.
There's a little sledge there.
Very easy to face of the facts
that it was once a thriving block of flats.
Oh, yeah, look.
So this is pretty strange. I can't quite make heads nor tails.
I don't think any books or anything were left in this building,
everything was kind of taken, so it's almost like they've created
this little thing. It's got the original Soviet flag,
it's got a map of Pripyat.
This is the social media affect.
It's even reached Chernobyl.
Because people want to come here, they want to make videos,
they want to show off, they want to, erm, create dangerous stunts
and, actually, this is sort of their playground.
That's a post-disaster effect nowadays.
The problem is so widespread, it's common for the police to arrest
at least one stalker on every patrol.
If they get caught, do they get arrested?
Darkness has set in and it has a whole different feel now.
It's getting late, and with no arrests tonight,
the police head off to patrol other parts of The Zone.
I think it's fair to say that's the strangest,
most surreal night patrol I've ever been on.
It's just a whole other face to Chernobyl.
The stalkers might have eluded us tonight,
but we have another plan to track them down.
Nikolai, my minder, reckons that tomorrow morning
we'll definitely snare us our stalker.
I'm spending a week inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone,
a toxic wasteland that I've discovered is now
a major attraction for illegal sightseers and thrill-seekers.
I want to understand why these so-called stalkers come here
and what Chernobyl means to the generation who weren't around
at the time of the accident.
Nikolai has managed to track down a stalker through social media
and he's willing to talk to me.
He's there. Down here somewhere? Yes, on his way back from The Zone.
Stalkers enter The Zone illegally
so we're meeting just outside the border.
Apparently they're on their way back from Pripyat
so they well might have been there when I was there.
Hey, he's over there. Hey.
No, no, we're good.OK.
How long were you in Pripyat for? Four days. Four days?
And when you're in Pripyat, where where do you stay?
In my apartment. Your...? Yes, I can show you my videos from there.
This is my house, where we live.
Good morning.
How did you get in? Illegally way.
From the perimeter fence, it's around 30km to Pripyat.
The Zone is a vast wilderness.
To avoid the police, stalkers must trek through toxic forests
and cross ice-cold rivers.
So, crossing the river in your pants, it's got to be cold.
Argh!
The water was this deep.
With this backpack, I turn in my hands, and go across this river.
You don't understand how it's cold.
Argh!
Why do you do it?For me it is just like a new adventure
and every time it is very different.
For example, I find police and run away.
Second time I meet many stalkers also illegally.
It's like adventure and shock for me.
Reaching Pripyat is the stalker's Holy Grail...
..a place where they can share their extreme thrill-seeking
on social media.
The dangers of this illegal trespass are clear.
That must be scary up there. Wow. Look at that.
Do you not worry about radiation?
I know where it's dangerous
and it's, like four days radiation not kill you, so why not?
See you.
Fascinating, that.
Here, I suppose, is in modern Ukrainian youth who's embracing
2020, 2021, and social media
and making videos and keeping stories alive.
It's a form of history telling, isn't it? Really.
It's the new world meeting the old world.
It's kind of cool
and weird and...unexpected.
I'm back inside The Zone.
Its size still astounds me.
1,000 square miles of crumbling villages, toxic forests
and abandoned farmland.
But when the eyes of the world turned to Chernobyl
they found far more here than just a ruined nuclear plant.
In a remote part of The Zone, Nikolai has special knowledge
of something that was once classified at the highest level.
We are off to see something secret, remains of the Cold War.
It's truly amazing.
I'm going to a site that, at the time of the Chernobyl disaster,
was marked on Soviet maps as a children's camp.
Wow.
It had quite a climbing frame.
You guys don't do things by halves.
This is an amazing feat of Soviet engineering.
The scale of this place. I feel dwarfed by it.
It's like a 50-storey building.
So what exactly is this?
During the Cold War, this was able to detect incoming missiles
in case of a nuclear strike.
Purpose of this was to give a seven-minute warning
to the Soviet authorities.
And this was a technology available only in Soviet Union.
So Americans didn't have anything like this.
The huge radar receiver was built around the same time
as the power plant,
helping to conceal from the Americans the 14,000 tonnes of steel
that needed to be brought on site for its construction.
It stands 150 metres high and nearly a kilometre wide.
So how did this actually work? Radio waves?
Yes, and the radio geeks in the '80s, with their radio scanners,
could hear a sound of the radar station.
MECHANICAL CLICKING
Some people were calling it a Russian woodpecker
because it sounded a bit like woodpecker
and it was clearly coming from Russia,
so that's why Russian woodpecker.
If you were picking that up, if you were a ham radio operator
in America, I can see how you'd start thinking, "What is this?"
Did the Americans know about this? When did they first see it?
After the meltdown.
When all the spy satellites had turned their eyes here,
they suddenly discovered this massive frame
in the middle of nowhere.
That was quite a surprise.
Because of its size and weird look there are many conspiracy theories,
so some people believe that this was a mind controller,
like a brain scorcher of the Soviet Union that was operating
radio waves to control and change human behaviour.
I'm trying to imagine the people who thought it could control your mind.
I feel I need a vodka now. You do. Has it affected me?
THEY LAUGH
We're 100% sure it's not operating now
and we can sleep tight tonight. We are not zombies yet.
The radar network is another example of the Soviets
looking the wrong way.
While they scanned the horizon for the incoming threat,
it was actually the failure of their own nuclear technology nearby
that ultimately led to the disaster they all feared.
Now, there's just one truly extraordinary place
I'm yet to visit.
Somewhere that very few will ever get the opportunity to see.
Tomorrow I'm going directly beneath the vast Chernobyl Radiation Shield,
getting as close as is possible
to get to the very epicentre of the explosion.
I'm returning to the Chernobyl Power Plant to gain access
to something off limits to almost all outsiders.
Deep inside the enormous steel arch,
known as the New Safe Confinement, is the entombed remains
of the ruined reactor itself, the very epicentre of the explosion.
After months of discussions
I've been granted just a few minutes inside.
This is pretty special to be allowed to go into there.
That's why there's lots of people keeping an eye on me,
lots of paperwork, it's taken a long time to get these permissions.
Directly underneath the arch,
radiation levels are even higher than Control Room Number 4.
It's kind of like going to war.
I think we're about to head into the final area.
Wow. Oh, my goodness.
This... This is unbelievable. I mean, I can't...
I can't quite believe I'm actually in here.
Behind the scaffold is the crumbling concrete sarcophagus
that was hastily erected to entomb the blown apart reactor.
If you can hear that beeping, that was everyone's dosimeters
from outside going off, cos it's off the scale in here.
We're up to 85, almost 90.
Over time and exposed to the elements, the concrete sarcophagus
has deteriorated and is teetering on collapse.
The entire structure will be painstakingly disassembled,
its still hot radioactive core removed
and placed in special storage facilities.
So when the workers eventually start to dismantle this,
how long can each worker spend doing their job?
It will all be robotics?Yeah.
Very slowly everything will be picked apart.
This is modern day liquidators. This is history repeating itself.
All those men that were sweeping the debris off the roof,
it's going to happen again.
Spearheaded by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development,
over 40 countries came together to fund the £1.3 billion arch.
For at least the next century,
this extraordinary feat of mega engineering will protect
and enable the radioactive ruins of reactor 4
to eventually be made safe.
Trying to explain to you now my emotions, it's really weird,
because I feel surprisingly emotional
to see what is arguably
a wretched, terrible place.
But what I see coming in here is hope
and that's what I love cos this is the hope of what technology can do.
This is the hope of what people collaborating, multi nations came
together to create this dome and protect it for another 100 years
and isn't that incredible that over the next couple of decades, robots,
you know, AI, artificial intelligence, that so many people
think could ruin the world,
could actually help save it and preserve it.
So my emotions right now are of great pride for this country,
for everyone who worked on it
and showing what humanity can do.
BEEPING
Got about 30 seconds left in here.
You can hear everyone's dosimeters going off.
Whoo, gosh. Chris, we have to get out.
Chris, we've gotta go.Yeah.
Our time is up.
Everything is checked for contamination but we're all clear.
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is still a long way from being a safe,
habitable environment but slowly green shoots are emerging.
The wider Zone itself has become a giant laboratory
where scientists and conservationists can now
safely study the effects of radiation and what happens
to nature when humans disappear.
What is this we're going into now?
Biologist Marina Shkvyria has been studying wildlife in The Zone.
So, all of this here has grown since this was all abandoned?
What's interesting is when I look at my dosimeter,
it's a little bit higher in here, perhaps, and I know that
if I go down towards the moss,
it goes up quite a lot and yet nature has flourished here.
Marina and other scientists believe that without hunting,
farming and the destruction of natural habitats,
The Zone is becoming an unlikely wildlife sanctuary.
We're tracking wolves.
Have you found anything, Marina?
Yeah. You can see tracks, yeah?
This one?Oh, yes, I've got it.
How many wolves do you think have come through here?
There are plenty of wolf tracks but in an area the size of Luxembourg,
seeing them was always going to be a long shot.
Luckily, Marina and her team have caught glimpses of the wildlife
that live in The Zone on remote cameras.
So, this is from a drone?
That's a beautiful shot. Wow, look at that,
galloping off across the landscape.
How beautiful is that?
Marina, how did these horses get here in the first place?
Were they introduced?
And wolves! Look at that. Incredible.
Just amazing to see the array of animals on those camera traps.
Moose, deer, wolves, lynx.
There's even bears.
So many animals living in this extraordinary Exclusion Zone.
The planet faces unprecedented challenges -
many of them, like Chernobyl, of our own making.
I came here looking for hope.
What I've discovered here in Chernobyl is that this is
supposed to be a radioactive wasteland for tens,
maybe hundreds of thousands of years...
..and yet nature's reclaiming it.
I mean, look at this.
This, for me, is really exciting part of the Chernobyl story
cos it's the accidental hope that came from it.
Some people are calling this the European Amazon.
This is almost the greatest, accidental rewilding project
in the world because where there was wretchedness and disaster
has come this extraordinary return to the wild.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media