How Instagram Ruined Chernobyl…Again.

in 2019 HBO released a critically acclaimed miniseries about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster the world's worst the show is regarded as generally accurate beautifully shot and well acted all intentional of course what was not intended what could not be stopped was a social media driven Gold Rush for fans of the show to see the site for themselves starting in 2019 and continuing up until the invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 tourism companies many newly made were bringing one to two thousand tourists into the Chernobyl exclusion Zone every day this was disaster tourism of a different kind unlike going to see something like the remains of Pompeii the explosion of people touring Chernobyl and the surrounding areas was a genuine Hazard both to the health of tourists and to the fragile Integrity of the zone when I arrived in Chernobyl in the October of 2021 I saw some of these hazards firsthand to me and to The Experts I spoke to the HBO miniseries and the influencers it brought to the Zone were maybe the worst thing to happen to the area since fission products first drain down on it in the April of 1986 this is the true story of chernobyl's second disaster having arrived in Ukraine to join a team of nuclear scientists engineers and Specialists I was expecting the trip to be fairly exclusive and while we did see things hardly any civilian would have access to there were tourists everywhere cars and buses with radioactivity symbols and respirator logos came and went from the power plant like clockwork influencers documented their meals in the plants cafeteria the food is surprisingly good by the way groups of young people phones in hand and in street clothes walked the same wooded paths in the abandoned city of pripyat that we did as radiation counters clicked so too did the simulated shutter sounds of iPhones business cards crumpled underfoot like the explosion of reactor 4 37 years earlier human intervention was once again changing the Ukrainian Woods a few hours north of Kiev and as I found out it even got to the point where tour guides were apparently manipulating objects in the zone actively trying to make the area seem more menacing than it had been in decades and keep in mind since 1986 there hasn't been a single confirmed radiation related death in the zone I think you know the tour operators will come in here who knows what the story is some some died a horrible death so it's a hard hat a respirator and moose bones that they've gathered up and tried to arrange so I mean I remember rib bones you know to make it look like you know somebody died here and so you'll see that as we travel throughout the area and throughout the zone you see a lot of staged areas where people have taken stuff like this old toys and books and I've set them up in pripyat been coming here prior to the the miniseries just seeing the difference and seeing you know how you've got people coming out here to take Instagram pictures or whatever it is yeah you see a lot of stage things I've also seen a lot of things that were there year after year they're radioactive that I would survey that are gone now so I can't help but think somebody who grabbed this as a souvenir not knowing how radioactive it was during a walk through pripyat our team visited the claw a famously radioactive object that helped clean rooms heaping with radioactive material after the disaster to train surveying techniques and learn the principles of radioactive safety we're off scale I don't want to come over there while we did so more than one group of tourists would get what only can be considered as dangerously close to the corpse of the giant machine the metal here contaminated with radioactive graphite was off the charts on our detectors that cost tens of thousands of dollars and yet Tom told us that sitting inside the claw or putting your head inside the Jaws was a popular photo op apparently not discouraged by tour leaders sitting inside quote the most dangerous thing in the zone I would expect that if we could actually move this thing we'd probably find some chunks of fuel and pretty highly contaminated stuff down below but it's it's very radioactive still and Faded so again I mean I've been here multiple times and see tour groups come through and they're touching it well if you don't have a meter like the scientists here have a meter it's just the other tourists aren't getting the information that we're getting which is exactly stay away yeah you know tourist-driven changes to the Zone had apparently gotten so bad that even so-called stalkers the Shady and somewhat mythical individuals who illegally trespass in the exclusion Zone had taken it upon themselves to preserve the original state of objects like the claw and the rest of this radiation created preserve so it was recently repainted it was black and white striped the last time I was here the time before it was Pink And so there's stalkers that come in and try to you know they try to clean up after people and so they repainted it to the original color and they said we've left paint in the area and a few people know where that paint is so the same thing as we were coming into town there was a sign that said pripyat the white sign it gets graffitied all the time wait so Tom the tourist problem has gotten so bad that the stalkers who come in here illegally illegally have tried to undo some of the damage exactly so you've got like these two levels of stalkers yeah you know the stalkers are coming in and do stuff like this and some of them think they're angry that the instagramers will come and take pictures so they try to deface it sure and then you've got the other group of stalkers who come in and try to fix up some of the buildings there's a kindergarten classroom that they've redecorated and wow and then they try to repaint stuff like this so it's interesting that is interesting to see how that works I've tried to make it very clear in this series that the Chernobyl exclusion zone is not the nuclear Wasteland you think it is there are no three-headed beasts no glowing green heaps of metal but that doesn't mean that the Zone isn't or can't be dangerous it definitely can be while our group of scientists did our best to be as safe as possible change clothes inside the power plant each day screen our shoes for contamination after leaving a location monitor our whole body dose over the course of a week there was clear evidence that others were not being so safe so this track used to be over here and so I just you just see things it just been moved and I'm thinking who's picked this stuff up and and carried it you know you being a nuclear expert and working in the industry would you pick that up and touch that not with my bare hands I you know if I had gloves on and protective clothing I'm like but why so I just I don't know if people are I don't know what they're saying do you think like amazing as you see the tourists come in here would you like would you recommend how they're dressed and what they're doing it's definitely dangerous you've seen it I mean you know we're required to wear long sleeves and and you see them and it was short short sleeve shirts they've got water bottles with them they're eating you know you just this is whole area is considered area a or the accent area and it's content it's considered a contaminated area so you shouldn't be eating drinking yeah smoking chewing things like that and you see it all the time in a grossly contaminated environment one of the worst things you can do is contaminate yourself knowingly or not and because of the sheer number of tourists entering and exiting the Zone looking for something to bring back with them digital or otherwise this contamination was surely happening when 2019 came along in the HBO miniseries Chernobyl happened in 2019 there was up to 2 000 people touring through the exclusion Zone every single day once that started happening pripyad looked very different from what Tom and Lucas remember when they first got here the vandalism the trash the broken windows ruining these pieces of pripyat that could have been preserved could have been saved it's to the point now where chernobyl's stalkers pripyats stalkers those who illegally enter the exclusion Zone and stay here and do whatever it is they do the Hape started self-policing they've started leaving little wanted signs and posters that they make themselves on a printer saying this stalker or that stalker is defacing the city that they love so much or think about so much that they illegally enter it's a wild thing that even in a place like this social media and our obsession with showing people who we are and what we do and it can it can affect even a an area that was hit by the worst nuclear disaster in human history can be chernobyl's second disaster this log book is you know has always been here for as long as I've been coming but there used to be some article of clothing here like a shirt or something it was all wadded up and it read five or six Mr per hour and it's just always been here until the left maybe a year or two ago and I just think somebody probably grabbed it took it up took it home not knowing what it was or as a souvenir I don't know the fact that people are coming in here touching things taking things it's kind of frightening [Music] to his credit the creator of the Chernobyl miniseries did publicly denounce the influencer type behavior in Chernobyl that is show galvanized and pretty much every public reaction to this trend was negative to the point of Ridiculousness but of course this didn't stop anyone [Music] as a science Communicator the transformation of the Chernobyl exclusion Zone into a sizable tourist attraction without adequate Safety and Security is in my opinion a public health hazard I didn't see any real caution exercised by tourists and the more people that move through the more chance there is for apparently lacks oversight to cause harm either to the tourists themselves or to the zone now it's hard for me from this perspective to take any real moral High Ground over the vast majority of people I just want an interesting photo and would never do something stupid like grabbing a radioactive piece of clothing from a destroyed Hospital at the same time there's nothing really stopping them from doing that in the back of my mind while my group was offering a moment of silence to the first man who died during the disaster heads down in a dark Dusty extremely radioactive room a highlight of my trip I knew that someone else's highlight was in creating something like this I can't tell you that I didn't find it disrespectful and I can't tell you it didn't make me angry it did the fact of the matter is that when the war in Ukraine comes to an end Chernobyl in the exclusion Zone will likely become the epitome of disaster tourism once again it's not all bad tourism does inevitably bring money into the area the city where I stayed slavutic was perfectly nice clean air good food good people deserving of the money still the majority of those who book a tour of Chernobyl are not going to be nuclear engineers and in a highly contaminated environment with little to no rules enforcement that can only be a continuous non-zero risk and I just I see things that are missing you hear about boots that have been taken out of the basement firefighter boots that are reading you know probably hundreds of Mr per hour sure this is crazy hundreds of milligrams per hour is hot enough to give whoever may have taken that boot the lowest yearly dose clearly linked to increased cancer risk in just 24 hours until next time [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 1,123,031

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, chernobyl, nuclear, chernobyl explosion, nuclear power plant, pripyat chernobyl, chernobyl disaster, nuclear power, nuclear accident, soviet union

Id: 326wzbsmjGk

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Adduum]

Kyle: Hey, this is what the zone is like and why it is dangerous, yet not it isn’t thought about correctly by the average person

Armchair nuclear physicist and md: Good visuals, but you are actually adding to the problem by telling people that the problem exists and explaining nuclear concepts

Good job as always though, please don’t let a few people make your day the slightest bit worse by people sending a few bytes between computers

[u/Uzzer_lozer19]

Great video as always and put forward in a constructive and meaningful way. It must be a challenge when you know so much about the damage and destruction from an invisible killer can have on people but they go unchecked.

I would hope that after the war in the Ukraine and the incidents that have happened there with the staff maintaining the area and the remaining facilities that new safeguards are put in place.

I can't begin to put myself in the shoes of the tourist operators trying to make a fast buck as they may not understand the risk they are putting people in. If anything it is the influencers and tourists who should know what they are actually walking into and seeing.

I made me think that this is why there are cages in zoos to preserve the animals and their habitat but also protect the visitors who come to see. Unfortunately in pripyat there are no cages and the dangers continue to bite especially if you've taken a souvenir