Since hearing about the movement and successful installation of the Shelter Object at the remains of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, I’ve been in a weak version what I call a “Chernobyl” mood, where I’ve been hunting for information, photos, and videos of the subject off and on this past month. Nothing too out of the ordinary has shown up, but recently as I was going through my favorites on YouTube I found this video, a 20 minute film put together about the city of Pripyat, located adjacent to the Nuclear Power Station, and the city most directly affected by the disaster.
It’s interesting to think that the day the explosion happened, a film crew was in the town filming footage as part of a documentary on Soviet nuclear power plants. This footage shows life in the city before the disaster, during the first days of the disaster, and then finally during the evacuation, as well as showing the cleanup efforts at the damaged reactor. Some of that footage is used artisticly alongside many wonderful pieces of music (including the somewhat legendary “Прекрасное Далеко” or “Beautiful Future” from the well known 1980’s children’s show “Guest From The Future”) to capture the feeling of the city dying as it did.
Chernobyl will always be a very interesting subject to me, as it has been since I was a child. Granted, there has been another major nuclear disaster since then (Fukushima), Chernobyl will always be the disaster that others are compared to, and incidentally, has created a beautiful area where, for 30 years, a city has slowly decayed with minimal human interaction; something about such abandonment I enjoy, despite the tragedy of an entire city of 50,000 people having to be moved from their homes forever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pripyat