Sprol

Chernobyl in 1986 – The worst nuclear accident ever happened right here about a month before this photo was taken. You can see the Pripyat River flowing past the twelve kilometer long cooling pond. Under normal conditions warm water would be pumped into the pond and circulate around the whole pond counterclockwise. The power plant is at the northwest side of the pond, and the town of Chernobyl itself is slightly south of the pond.
After the accident the land was abandoned and over 120,000 people were relocated under emergency conditions. They and over half a million other people involved with the cleanup effort also received substantial doses of radiation affecting them and all future generations

The radiation also affected wild plants and animals around Chernobyl. Pine forests soon died, cattails grew three heads, and wild animals declined in number. But in the coming years, as the short-lived radionuclides decayed and the longer-lived contaminants settled deep into the soil, the wildlife rebounded. Human abandonment also made habitat available for birds, deer, rodents, wolves, boar and other animals. These populations appear to be increasing despite the extraordinarily high mutation rates caused by contamination in the food chain and by one of the highest background radiation levels in the world. source

Chernobyl in 1992 – A photo taken six years later shows the abandonment of the area. The grey areas of farmland show where native vegetation has taken over the fields. You can also see the white snakelike system of dams built by the Soviets to try and keep contaminated, radioactive water out of the river. The Soviets loved to build dams… there are about 22,000 dams that the Soviets built in Ukraine alone.

Massive water projects like the centralized hot water and heating system in Kiev were a hallmark of a centrally planned economy. This kind of thinking pervaded their power strategy as well, focusing on building tremendous facilities to serve large geographic regions. Big reactors mean any problem is magnified by the scale of the facility.

You can see how large the disaster footprint was in this image of the surrounding region. The yellow box represents the area depicted in the top photos. That one reactor contaminated the areas around it enclosed in overlapping blue lines.

Consider that about 7.5% of the carbon and mercury put into the atmosphere to generate electricity essentially goes to moving the electricity to where it is being used. So the bigger and farther away you make the facility, the larger it needs to be.

So in this tremendous power complex a leaky concrete crypt holds Chernobyl Unit 4 while they keep running the other reactors, which are of the same design. Their maintenance status is uncertain, but they are operational, along with 62 other nuclear plants in the former Eastern bloc. Half of them were built in the 1970s.

Chernobyl is a ghost town now, as you can read in this fascinating and semifictionalized account (photos and geography are accurate and amazing).

The odd thing is that these areas aren’t the most dangerous or polluted regions in the former Soviet Union, either. Central planning is a very powerful force. Central planning transformed an agrarian peasant economy into a ‘superpower’ in three generations, completely wrecking the environent in the process.