Is It Actually Safe To Live In Chernobyl?

Chernobyl is a ghost city situated 9 miles south of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The nuclear accident that happened there in 1986 was one of the biggest disasters in human history. The city of Chernobyl was evacuated nine days after the nuclear accident. However, Chernobyl was not the city that was most affected by the disaster. Pripyat was much closer to the power plant, and it was evacuated 30 hours after the accident happened.

Pripyat was larger than the city of Chernobyl and was built as a home for the workers in the power plant.  Both cities are now ghost towns, although there is a small number of people still living in Chernobyl. There are several stores and a hotel for tourists visiting the site of the accident also there.

The 1986 Power Plant Disaster

The disaster that happened at the Chernobyl power plant on April 26th, 1986, is considered to be one of the worst nuclear disasters ever to occur in human history. The accident happened while a safety test was being performed on one of the reactors. During the test, which was supposed to simulate a power outage to prepare the workers for the procedure during such an event, the power dropped more than expected. This put the reactor in an extremely unstable condition. The combination of those conditions and the flaws in the design of the reactor itself caused a nuclear chain reaction.

This only applies to the place where we can find the remains of the reactor. Those remains are highly radioactive, but getting close to them is forbidden anyway. The contamination levels are not consistent, so it is hard to determine precisely when the wider Chernobyl area will be considered completely safe. People are living there; however, that fact does not prove that it is completely safe to lead a healthy everyday life there. You should probably hold off on moving to Chernobyl anytime soon.