Chernobyl at 40: the exclusion zone as a workplace and a nature reserve
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readForty years after the 1986 accident, World Nuclear News has published a feature on life in the Chernobyl exclusion zone - the area of northern Ukraine and southern Belarus that was closed after the disaster. Its point is that the zone was never simply empty.
Work continued there from the start. Besides the liquidators, who received high radiation doses during recovery and clean-up, the plant still needed a workforce: Chernobyl's three undamaged reactors kept supplying electricity for years, and the last did not close until the end of 2000. During that period, the feature says, almost 6,000 people worked at the plant every day. A new town, Slavutych, was built about 45 kilometres away for workers evacuated from Pripyat. Designed by eight Soviet republics, each giving a district its own style, it received its first residents in October 1988 and has around 25,000 people today.
The zone's second life is as a reserve. The Polesie State Ecological Reserve was established in the Belarusian sector in 1988, and the Chernobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve in the Ukrainian part in 2016; together they form one of the largest nature reserves in mainland Europe. The United Nations Development Programme has described the zone as Europe's biggest rewilding experiment, and it has long been a site for radioecology research. Tourism, developed on both sides before 2022, is now restricted in Ukraine under martial law, with visits limited to approved educational, scientific and official purposes.
What it means
The exclusion zone is often used as shorthand for a place nuclear power made uninhabitable. The record is more complicated: a working power station for fourteen years after the accident, a town built to serve it, and an area where wildlife has flourished in the absence of people, even as some parts remain unsafe.
None of that diminishes the accident or its human cost. It does make the zone a real-world data set on long-term radiation effects and on what happens to land when human activity stops - which is why scientists keep returning to it.