Slashdot Mirror
Chernobyl...18 Years Later
abysmilliard writes "A young Ukrainian woman has posted a photo journal of her motorcycle rides through Chernobyl and the area surrounding it. Included are pictures of the now-emptied city, maps of current radiation levels, and a discussion of how the area has changed. While the english is quite broken, it's often rather surreal, as well, with quotes like, 'I don't know how sound the silence to those tourists that they can not stand it, but to me after hitting a red line on my bike tacho it sound like all those ghosts cursing 1100cc kawasaki engin.'"
The disaster was a damn good example of bad mix of technology, science and politics. Boy, don't we have plenty of that in the U.S.
... but not all that is invisible and harms is radioactive. Heavy metals such as mercury, PCBs etc, can be seriously nasty. The sheer calous lack of regulation of these pollutants by governments world-wide is unbelievable. Even your fabric-softener can have mercury put in it.
So while there is this collective phobia and aura surrounding radiation, there isn't around other many other toxic threats. Note the security surrounding nuclear materials, but how easy it was to obtain unbelievably toxic dimethylmercury (until someone killed herself when a droplette momentarily touched her protective glove) until recently.
There's another site out there with pictures of the abandoned buildings. Something about it is incredibly compelling and sad; almost like looking at a modern-day Pompeii. People who were children back when this happened go back there and spray-paint messages to former classmates on the walls of their elementary schools, trying to contact them or just to say they're still still around.
:60 Minutes segment a few years ago that the gov't pipes music into various parts of the city, where apparently there are still some people working--this is to keep them from going insane from the silence.
I also saw on a
She shows a nice map of the radiation levels, but without showing the scale it doesn't mean jack. She has the norm listed as 12-18.
I am guessing that she means millirem per hour, but I honestly have no idea. Anyone know?
This comment in the essay: This is highest building in town and in April 26-27, 1986 after reactor exploaded, people gathered on the roof of this building to watch a beautiful shining that rised above APP. They didn't know this was shining of radiation. they learned it on next day when evacuation began reminded me of talks I had with some of my patients some years ago that either lived in southern Utah and Nevada, or were in the military. Whole families would gather on high mountains to watch the pretty lights from the atomic bombs being tested in the open air and I had one old army guy tell me that soldiers who were gathered at the exercises, if they were not issued goggles, were told to look away and cover your eyes with your hands. When the bomb went off, you could actually see the bones in your hands from all the X-rays that were emitted from the bomb.
Amazingly scary.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I think it would be fun to go there myself and check things out on my bicycle for a day. Unfortunately my Russian friends would all be too chickenshit to actually go with me.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The MOST interesting thing in the article to me though was the "deafening silence" that is mentioned. The author said that many companies have investigaed doing things like 2 hour tours but the tourists complain and want to go home after 15 minutes because it's so quite it's like being deaf. I wouldn't think that it would be so bad (go to wheat feild in the middle of the US and it's silent too), but I guess it's the combination of all the buildings and normal city sights (with the exception of the fact that there are no people) and the silence that makes it so eerie and spooky.
I bet it's spooky as hell there.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Now, i am happy that i was one of the few who got to see it (like others said, angelfire and slashdot? yeah, right) and I found it very very interesting.
But i'd like someone to do some sort of anthropological study of how these little stories get noticed and submitted to slashdot and other blogs (is slashdot a blog? hmmm).
I'm curious who found this story.. was it the author of the page? a friend, or a really interesting "other"...
Very troubling to know that there is a city where silence alone can scare one away...Kind of funny how one can find total peace in the shadows of death, destruction, and the flaws of man. I, for one, would love to visit it..Apocalyptic visions are filling my head already..
nothing.can.stop.me.now
Reminds me of the song "Three Mile Island" by Pinkard & Bowden. It talks about how at TMI baseball field during the night games... they turn the lights down. 'Cause the home team... glows in the dark.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
"marauders in radiation poluted area are not just a regular marauders, they don't steal stuff for themselves. There were cases of radiactive tv sets and other stuff being sold on city second hand markets and then police shot 7 or 8 of them and it helped"
Now, does that sound like the Soviet Russia from a bad movie, or what?
It's about a little automated house with no one living there. It told about how it would make breakfast, and clean it up with little mechanical sweeper mice, and the house eventually burns down. The house is in a town that is empty because of a nuclear blast and the only "people" left there is a "shadow" of someone left on a wall from the nuclear blast. Interesting and sad story. The place was just as if everyone had suddenly vanished from the face of the Earth. Everything else was left.
I want to say it was in "A Brave New World" but it could have been a H2G2 book.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Your wish is the LiveJournal's command.
The pictures are just sooo eerie. The housing in the pictures is a perfect visual example of the kind of large apartment complexes built in the Soviet Union at that time. Large sprawling 16-24 story houses with balconies and nearby schools, playgrounds, stores and hospitals. She mentions how they were brand new, just waiting for families to move into them.(In the Soviet Union your housing was assigned to you btw). Just seeing pictures of those apartment complexes was the most horrifying part of this entire photo journal. Interestingly enough it also reminded me of a Russian book, "Picnic by the Roadside" by Strugatski Brothers and the it's movie adaptation by Tarkovski(same guy who made the original Solaris) called "Stalker." Same idea of traveling through a modern ghostown after a catastrophe. Incredibly eerie.
The wonderful soclialist construction looks even better after eighteen years' passage. Sadly, it didn't look much different before the people left, save for being in better repair. No grandeur at all, just shabbiness.
Eastern Europe has come an awful long way since the fall of the "Evil Empire." Why people still admire it, I will never know.
Many people think the Chernobyl area is just like a desert. It's true, there are no people, but there ARE animals. Researches have found rats living there. When they tested those rats, which are living healthily, the scientists found that DNA of rats changed as fast as it had in last 20 million years. That's right, the radiation caused mutations (or evolution) in 20 years, at rate equal to 20 million years.
The rats aren't mutilated or anything, they just happen to adapt.
-------
FM Clan
That's the weird thing about the place. It's considered basically uninhabitable by humans. Yet nature as a whole seems entirely unfazed by the radition and is thriving in the absence of humans.
On the other hand, it really isn't that weird. The "nature preserve" aspect is only disturbing in relation to the empty roads and buildings. Without those features to provide the desolation aspect, nothing would seem amiss. Plus, nobody is keeping track of the average lifespan of those horses, which is almost certainly below average.
Still, a fascinating photo-essay either way. And I think it's funny that her Kawasaki probably would have been worth as much as a whole town in that part of the world in 1985.
...and accumulates in the dirt near the roads, because the roads are smoother and higher than the surrounding ground.
Now, there's been a group in every generation since Jesus that has managed to find evidence that it is the generation of the apocolypse. So far, they have all been wrong, but that doesn't seem to bother contemporary apoclyptics.
But they do have a clear idea of where we are in the sequence of events. As you can imagine most of the fitting of events is somewhat vague, or takes some generosity of interpertation. (Please bear with me, this is going somewhere). But there is something that is very late in the sequence (and lots of very dramatic things need to happen before it). This event is
And what is the Ukranian word for "wormwood"? Chernobyl.Somehow this news of the meaning of "Chernobyl" tends to disturb people who believe we are in the end times.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
On christmas day in my suburb there is almost no activity and usually cars are all taken inside. I don't know that it gets so quiet that I would freak and want to leave but it does have an especially eerie quality about it. Especially when in a formarly busy street I hear just the wind in the trees and maybe birds.
The disparaty between what I see and what I hear & feel is an experience. I've stood in the middle of the road times like this and just looked around at the world. I'd like to visit Pripyat too
nude macgirls webcam
is that Chernobyl is still producing power on the electrical grid. This might have changed recently but I doubt it.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
This site is amazing; the town looks just like any other town anywhere else in the world, but nothing is there.
The abandoned ferris wheel and barges gave me a serious case of the willies.
You know, maybe that would be a good use for all that Slashdot subscription money: funding for a place to mirror sites like these...
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Ok, so we know about 30 firefighters died within a few weeks of thea accident. Do people who died 88 years after the accident still count in the death toll?
I have never heard figures above a few thousand before this. Maybe she is being accurate to 3 decimal places? Does anyone have a real source?
I agree - the original /. article was half making fun of the language, but somehow it feel like if she had written it in Russian it would have had almost a weird sci-fi Dostoevskian quality... (how's that for a bad Russian stereotype!)
Hey. Let's not forget close-call that was "3 Mile Island" and another snafu here in the US: The SL-1 Accident in Idaho.
Chernobyl Reactor 2 was shut down in 1991 after a fire, Reactor 1 was shut down in '96 to scam money out of the EU, and reactor 3 (the last one standing) was shut down permanantly in December of 2000.
However, the cement structure encasing reactor 4 (the one that went boom) is starting to show signs of wear and about 10% of it is cracked.
Scientific types are warning about structural failure happening sooner rather than later. The real issue here is repairing that, because when it comes tumbling down we're going to be in a world of trouble again... and what with the no-soviet union anymore, good luck convincing anyone to go to ground 0 and clean it up (rather than forcing them to do it at gunpoint.)
Is what's left behind there - a big crumbling concrete tomb no one seems to want to take responsibility for. Someone had better goddamn well do it or else EVERYONE will suffer again.
There isn't a hole deep enough to bury this demon in. Chernobyl is the kind of thing that gives me real nightmares. Part of me wishes I never read that book. What a horrible, HORRIBLE disaster.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
My guess would be that asphalt absorbs less radiation than dirt/dust/mud/plants do.... whenever it rains, more radioactivity is washed off of the road and onto the areas around the road.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Sounds like Euless, Texas on the days after 9/11 when air traffic (DFW) was shut down. With no airtraffic and next to no vehicles on the roads it was very quite and very disturbing.
Here is a site with many more pictures of the military vehicle graveyard there.
As I recall, we have the Swedes to thank for 1st informing the world of the excessive radioactive fallout their detectors measured. It's a pity that even the reindeer in Lapland (northern Norway, Sweden & Finland) were affected as they ate grass which contained radioactive fallout. And the Lapps survive by eating reindeer.
Seems you were programmed well during the duck and cover days. I own a Russian motorcycle here in the US (named same as the river on the rad map) and find it very tough and reliable.
Don't believe all that you were fed, go there and hang out (not necessarily this place) and you will find some of our propaganda was true but a lot was/is not.
Riding through there does seem tempting!!
If you want to watch a good movie on the threat of vast radiation poisoning, watch the BBC movie Threads. I got this tip from another Slashdot post a while ago, and am passing it no. I had to go to my library to find it.
It is about how the "threads" of society essentially unravel within a generation after a nuclear attack, in the face of massive homelessness, starvation and of course widespread and incurable radiation sickness.
Lovely stuff.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Where a snapshot of life in the Roman Empire was captured in a momemt of disaster for posterity. With Pompeii, we wonder how foolish they were to see the obvious signs of the volcano ready to go, yet did not try to escape. With Chernobyl, we see...the same thing!
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
I think the most poignant part was the abandoned amusement rides, and how she said that was the part of that town where the radiation doses were strongest. That Ferris wheel standing still and silent, still painted red and yellow, was just... wow. I have no words.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
SuperBanana;
:)
:)
The vernacular is/was (snirk) "leathers" and yeah, it's really smart to wear them - if you lay your bike down, a good set of leathers will keep you from losing skin (to a point, eh
That said, it's part of the risk you take, not wearing them. Hell, riding a bike is what most, ehem, "sane" people would call a huge risk. It is. It's also a skill demo, to coin a phrase.
For a lot of us, we call it just riding. It's not the kick of defying death, it's not the thrill of risking spending time in the hospital regenerating tissue (been there)...it's just knowing, like mountain climbers and many others, that there's a thin skin between you and death (or serious injury).
It's for the freedom of doing what you want to do. It is what it is. One can't adequately describe it unless you've been there.
I'm 37, yet I still take risks. It makes me feel alive. I climb vertical rock faces with no other equipment than my feet and hands. It's not the rush, it's the satisfaction of knowing you can do it - meeting the challenge.
There is simply no way to explain that to people who haven't dreamed of or done it. It's like trying to talk to a different species. Not flaming you - it's just what it is.
Argh!
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Reminds me of another ghost town I've seen (personally)... It's Centralia in Pennsylvania. You get near it where I80 meets Knobles or Route 61. (IIRC) - The story is that there was a giant waste fire burned in a open pit near a mine that ended up burning down hot enough/low enough to hit an exposed vein of coal under the mountains. The town has been burning ever since. It's not like a giant wildfire that you may first imagine, but a slowly moving, ever constantly burning coalfire underground.
This fire started in 1961 and still burns today. Centralia no longer exists on some maps because it has been deserted (by most). Due to the underground fire, some portions of land is too hot to walk on or has simply been dried out/burned to a crisp from the heat below. I wish I still had pictures of what I was able to take (lost the pics in a HD crash.) - From a slightly higher viewpoint, you can literally see a band stretching across... sort of like a slow moving creature devouring everything in its path and turning it all charred black or seared white.
One of the most interesting things I came across was scorched wood near an open vent: The steam coming up from the ground carried copper and baked it into the wood/bark. Lots of rocks were simply bleached white from the heat. I tried to be a dumbass and stood near an open vent to piss on the rocks... the heat was pretty damn intense. My shoes started melting (though I was standing a bit away from the vent) before I could finish urinating.
A link. (I used some info to correct my faulty memory.)
The Chernobyl Photo Journal is _stunning_.. I have considered going back to Centralia in the summer to do a more extensive photo documentation along the lines this young woman has. Beautiful work. First thought in my mind when I saw some of the pics was how desolate Centralia was as well... very erie and hard to describe if not for pictures.
I am an American who got a bike license in the Netherlands. I wrecked my 95 Honda VFR750 two years ago, nearly to the day, on the north side of Hilversum, NL.
I was going about 45 mph, which isn't terribly quick, and things went awry. I was wearing a Clover textile jacket (hard armour, not unlike what the Ukraine girl was wearing with Kawa green). Triple stitched Carhartt jeans were covering my posterior.
The hard armour and the jacket saved me from a broken arm. My leather gloves kept my hands clean, and the jeans split at the center seam.
The results we a broken tailbone and a tiny bit of rash on my ace. I skidded over 25 ft and it's amazing what jeans will protect you from.
I walked away. The bike was totaled, despite me riding it home. You'd be amazed at what it really takes to cause serious damage.
Here is another real story:
a PDF document about a town in Iran with a comparable level of the natural background radiation, and people live there quite happily (or as happily as one can live in Iran, for that matter).
These were taken on a visit to the Chernobyl area by staff of the upcoming game "STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl" (based on the Chernobyl area)...
I could not find the original hosted site, but I had it backed up so I uploaded it for everyone here. It is very haunting. Anyway, check it out:
http://ii.net/~eenhoorn/s/Chernobyl/chern.html
It's a Bagel.
Greenpeace released a similar site a while back about the Mayak plant. The Mayak plant released the same amount of radiation over 50 years than Chernobyl released at once, and it's totally fucked up the area. Minatom don't want to shut it down and they're still reprocessing fuel.
Half Life: The Dangerous Effects Of Nuclear Waste
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
I had the chance to visit the national museum in Kiev two years ago.
It was truly amazing, I hope that they make a good movie about it becouse it seems that most people only learn about the world from movies.
In the museum they had two newspapers, one a Soviet and an American the day after. On the American the disaster was on the main page as the headline. On the soviet it was on the 6th page in a little box in the cornner.
Once the Soviets figured out the shit they were in - on the third day - they started to evacuate people. There was one film they showed of little kids playing, you could see bright flashes in the film. It was from radiation on the film. (Think airport xrays)
Another film showed the clean up crew. Each soldier was given a gas mask and a iorn vest. Before the door the took a shot of vodkia and walked out - Each man would shovel for 30 seconds and then go home. Most died a few days later.
On a side note my parents and brother meet some local people and they went out to a beach on the river (look at the map on that website). My father was just reciently diagnosses with tyroid cancer (in germany) a was not too happy so none of them swap just watched. Later my dad finds out that they were in the red-zone. Mind you there were a lot of kids playing in the water.
For those who may not know - the nuclear plan was just recienty shut down ('98 i think). It had been in operation for quite some time (using the remaning reactors)
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
Here is a look at just how extensive the damage was.
here ya go. Some info on the death toll. after reading that page I suggest your click around that site a little, it's a good read. /.ers) what is BS and what is not.
Here is the authors bio for reference. He does know (unlike most
There's something really cyberpunk about this, and not in the glitz-and-glamor Mondo2000 sort of way.
/. article ever.
I think it's the duality between the rusted-out poisonous landscape, the hot motorcycle, and the logo jacket.
Very cool. Best
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Urban archaeology doesn't have the following of some hobbies, like stamp-collecting or professional sports, but I can see its appeal.
All constructions, like all people, have life cycles. They're built/conceived, people move in, they're lived-in, they have make-overs/get remodeled, they have mid-life crises/get remodeled tastelessly to hide the structure's growing problems, the spirit leaves/people move out, and get torn down.
If the area is busy enough, there's no gap between moving out and tearing down. And if the area is really busy, there's no gap between the tearing down and the building up, the quest eternal for the Next Big Thing.
Sometimes places die, and this interests people. Pripyat has the dubious distinction of actually being killed, and of course there's some interest in its slowly decaying municipal corpse. And there are other ways for a place to die suddenly too.
Obligatory links:
Come to think of it, there's a place not far from me, pretty much right in the middle of Annapolis, which I need to snap pictures of for posterity's sake. Sure, I'll be using a digital camera, but...
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Hmmm, how much do I want to play that game now. Are we sure this isn't a plant by Nvidia? :)
i live a few miles from national airport (and the pentagon), and our airport was closed for WEEKS, nearly closed forever had some in the white house had their druthers. some things you don't realize are there until they're gone, and you'd find yourself kind of waiting for the next jet. all we did hear was the flights of military jets, which normally pass over here at less than a thousand as they cut through over national from andrews, but now of course they sounded ten times as loud.
just after the jet hit, i just remember hearing all the sirens, headed in the same direction. our fire department (arlington) was the first there, reportedly the engine was out on another call and saw what happened. (yeah, i wondered what happened to the other call,, too.)
strange time here. then came the anthrax. then the snipers. yes, it did occur to me to wonder whether we should be here, but this is our home.
i notice that most of the biker's pictures (including the one of her in a kawasaki jacket, the brand she mentions repeatedly? did they pay her for promo?) of how the chernobyl area has gone to hell focus on decrepit buildings. well, of course manmade stuff would fall apart; how's nature doing? and to be honest i find it humbling and a tad reassuring that man's creations will go away once man has left, let the earth move on.
There is a game in the production -STALKER about Chernobil zone. Designers of the game took a special trip into Chernobil zone, to take pictures and get a feeling of the zone. Pictures form their trip (don't mistake them for screenshots)used to be buried somethere on their site.
Here are some of my bookmarks with photos of abandoned places . . . don't know how well any of them work:n /index. htmm lt tp://www.forgottendetroit.com/t en-ny.com/o logy.htmlw w.starfury.demon.co.uk/uground/m erica.com/lostframe.html. com/
http://detroityes.com/toc.htm#Gildedb ring.com/hub?ring=draining&list&page=1
http://members.tripod.com/airfields_freema
http://home2.planetinternet.be/henk/index.ht
http://www.columbia.edu/~brennan/abandoned/
h
http://www.forgot
http://www.acme.com/jef/photos/archae
http://www.infiltration.org/
http://w
http://www.losta
http://www.modern-ruins
http://www.losthighways.org/radebaugh.html
http://e.we
Regarding nuclear power, it is important to remember that uranium can run out just like fossil fuels, and in fact if we had started out using nuclear power instead of oil for energy, we would certainly have run out of nuclear fuel by now. In other words, nuclear power is not a solution except as a pollution free way to power a few dozen densely populated areas.
I would, actually. It would be quite interesting.
I did an experiment one time... one you can't do since 9-11 probably. I took a digital geiger counter in an airliner. At about 10,000 feet it was close to off-scale.
There's lots of radiation around.
The only good weather is bad weather.
We've closed down most of the pits and are using North Sea gas to power the stations. How long is that going to last?
Wind and solar would be great, but what I've heard about yields from both, the investment to replace our power requirements would be immense and completely blight the landscape of the country.
I haven't seen this mentioned here... This is what internet is really all about. It's not about major news sites displaying what they think people are interested in, or major retailers selling their usual wares, it's about individuals sharing their raw experiences and knowledge with everyone else in the world.
The Silver Lining in Chernobyl's Cloud
Published by the Sunday New York Times
September 03, 2000
The loudest protest over the closing of the nuclear plant is coming from a most unlikely place: the people who work there. What's a little radiation when it puts food on the table?
By MATTHEW BRZEZINSKI
There was a time when Leonid Aniskin was frightened of radiation. But that was before he went to work at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. He still remembers his first day on the job. It was in 1987, a little over a year after an explosion had ripped the roof off the plant's fourth reactor block. "The trees in the forest behind the station had all died," he recalls. "The pine needles had turned red and dropped off."
Soldiers were burying the radioactive tree trunks when he arrived for his first shift. Everywhere he looked there were men in masks and dark rubber suits, and orange bulldozers scraping away the contaminated soil.
The station's three undamaged reactors were all up and running by then, ordered back on line by Soviet central planners. While the world was still reeling from a disaster that spewed radiation over much of northern Europe and forced the evacuation of more than 100,000 people, the Kremlin was wrestling with a different issue: where to find workers willing to operate the stricken plant.
Aniskin was 27 at the time, a champion marathon runner and a newly graduated acoustical engineer. He and his wife, Marina, had just celebrated their first wedding anniversary and the birth of their son, Igor. Like most young couples, they were living in a crowded dormitory near the Kiev airport while waiting for a state apartment in a soulless high-rise. In those days, newlyweds faced years if not decades of communal showers and public toilets before they were assigned their own place.
There was a way, however, to bypass the waiting list. The Kremlin was building a new city 40 miles from Chernobyl -- just outside the depopulated Exclusion Zone -- a town unimaginably luxurious by Soviet standards. The nation's best builders had been harnessed for the showcase project, and construction crews from eight Soviet republics were working double-time to erect housing districts in the traditional styles of their lands.
Brand-new apartments were to be had in this "model city," which the Kremlin christened Slavutich after the Russian word for glory, and jobs that paid 10 times the average national wage. All Aniskin had to do to win this Faustian Soviet sweepstakes was sign up to work at Chernobyl.
"When Igor was born," he says, with the conviction of someone looking back on a difficult decision that came out right, "I decided to offer my family a chance at a better life."
It is a warm and breezy Saturday morning in Slavutich. Mothers push baby strollers in the central parade ground, and children play near the memorials to posthumous Heroes of Soviet Labor. In the Riga district, plant bosses tend their flower gardens, while the six-foot-wide Geiger counter over the pediatric wing of the nearby hospital flashes a reassuring 15.4 microroentgens -- about the same as in Denver -- if you stick within city limits, where the contaminated soil has been removed.
Leonid Aniskin has already run his daily 10 miles and is cooking breakfast for his family and me. The aroma of fish and fried potatoes fills the sunny second-story apartment and drifts into the living room, where Igor, now a tall and big-boned teenager, sits transfixed by a sumo wrestling match on ESPN's Eurosport. Aniskin brings out a pot of coffee and clamps his son in a good-natured headlock. "You don't want to become like them," he gibes in mock horror, pointing to the jiggling giants on the screen.
"Papa is a little crazy when it comes to exercise," announces Igor, who has his father's earnest face to go with short, spiky hair. Aniskin takes the rejoinder in stride. His thick hair may have grown silvery around the edges these past 13 years and he may have lost a step or two,
It's curious whether there is any scientific/industrial research going on in this direction. Let's note, Chernobyl is not the only technological disaster area in the world. The world is full of leaking, diffusing, lying in the open and pretty deadly chemical and radioactive stuff.
Practically every large city in North America and Europe has highly contaminted patches of land next to them due to the past or present industrial activities. Things can get very expensive when people finally figure out the reasons for soaring rates of cancer and other sicknesses.
Is there a technological solution to the problem? Nanotechnology? Genetic engineering? You can imagine cesium gathering ants and mercury hungry bees. There was a report somewhere about generically modified bacteria successfully neutralizing toxic chemical substances. Perhaps some ideas could be sparked by the Ukrainian biker chronicles.