Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
panses of concrete and clusters of squat buildings—the infrastructure for maintaining the
reactor building. Through the car's streaming windshield, I saw a dented metal gate block-
ing our way and a pair of concrete walls haloed with messy helixes of barbed wire.
On the other side of it all, attended by several spindly yellow construction cranes, was
the Shelter Object. I was struck again by its great size. The interlocking metal walls rose in
a colossal vault nearly two hundred feet tall, battleship gray streaked with rust, supported
on one side by tall, thin buttresses and on another by the giant, blocky steps of the so-called
Cascade Wall. Pipes and bits of scaffolding clung to its battlements, whose flat surfaces
were interrupted by a grid of massive metal studs. Catwalks traced the edges of its multiple
roofs, and a series of tall, shadowed alcoves notched the top of the north wall, like portals
from which giant archers might rain arrows down on the countryside.
I had envisioned this moment differently. Visiting the reactor building, I had assumed,
would not be fundamentally different from visiting the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal. But
those thoughts vanished under the growing thunderstorm. Instead, I felt an unexpected, vis-
ceral repulsion. It was obscene. This
thing.
A monument to brutality, a madman's castle
under siege from within itself. And it lived. It radiated danger and fear. It had warped the
land for miles around, creating its own environment, breathing the Exclusion Zone to life.
There was a visitor center. No gift shop, but there were diagrams and photographs, and
an excellent scale model of the Shelter Object. I was met by Julia, a serious woman in her
forties who gave me a quick handshake before loosing a torrent of information about the
accident and the reactor building. Much of it I already knew, but it took on fresh weight
in the aggressive Ukrainian accent of an Exclusion Zone bureaucrat. The visitor center's
picture window gave the lecture additional dramatic punch. Through it we had the world's
best, closest view of the ever-more-menacing Shelter Object, now crowned with forks of
lightning. And in case that wasn't enough, there was an electronic readout above the win-
dow that measured our radioactive exposure—138 micros at the moment.
“Sarcophagus took two hundred six days to
construct,
” said Julia. “Radiation levels at
north side of building after
accident
reached 2,000 rem per hour.” She waved her hand over
the model, a perfect replica, two or three feet tall. “On top of
building
they reached 3,000
rem per hour. This is appalling
level.
These are area where firemen were working.” I felt a
little sick. Even several hundred rem can be fatal, and the first responders to the Chernobyl
accident received many times that for every hour they spent on the building.
Thunder rattled the window. With practiced ease, Julia swung open the hinged front wall
of the model to reveal a cross-section of the interior, its wreckage recreated in painstaking
detail. With the actual building visible just out the window to the right, the model allowed
an intuitive understanding of the gargantuan scale of the reactor—and of the accident that
had destroyed it. Flicking my eyes back and forth, it was as if I could see right through the
