20 Jul Atomic Tours: Wildlife Hot Spots, or a Bad Adventure Trend?
Atomic (or nuclear) tourism has become a popular trend. Visitors to Chernobyl may spend some limited time in the “dead town” of Pripyat, where this school is located. ©Aliaksandr Palanetski, flickr
On April 26, 1986, Chernobyl, Russia, became the site of the world’s worst nuclear power plant disaster in history when a reactor exploded and spit out 400 times more radioactive fallout than the Hiroshima bomb. After the catastrophe, a highly contaminated area within a 30-mile radius of the reactor was sealed off.
Twenty-five years later, in 2011, the Ukrainian government deemed the radiation risks “negligible” and opened Chernobyl as a tourist attraction. That year, The Atlantic reported that thousands of travelers made visits; some, even, spent limited time in the “dead town” of Pripyat, where radiation levels are still relatively high.
In the past four years, what’s called “atomic tourism” or “nuclear tourism”—where sightseeing is focused on learning about the Atomic Age and where tourists visit significant sites in atomic history, such as museums with atomic weapons, vehicles that carried atomic weapons or sites where atomic weapons were detonated—has enjoyed a spike in popularity. But is this kind of adventure tourism safe?
Wildlife, after us
The eerie amusement park in Pripyat was never finished. ©Jayne Cravens, flickr
A tour to Chernobyl today involves taking more precautionary measures than with the usual vacation trip, such as signing multiple waivers and undergoing intensive radiation scans prior to entering and after exiting the disaster site.
Once past the paperwork—and through the mental processes of accepting the risks—extreme tourists are able to see sites such as the “red forest,” an area of pine trees that have turned to a shade of rust due to unnaturally high levels of radiation, and the sarcophagus built over the No. 4 building, a concrete and steel structure that was hastily erected after the accident to contain the damaged reactor. If adventurists are also traveling to Pripyat, a city founded in 1970 for the purpose of serving the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, they’ll find an abandoned amusement park, complete with a creepy, still and empty Ferris wheel. It’s almost like a scene from The Walking Dead.
But glimpses into “a world after us” aren’t the only attractions. Some adventure tourists say it isn’t just about the bragging rights that going to Chernobyl provides. There is serious wildlife-watching to be done. Nearly 30 years after the nuclear disaster, the woods are teeming with birds and large mammals.
Immediately after the 1986 disaster, much of the wildlife in the vicinity died of radiation. Many thought the area, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone especially, would be a place of permanent desolation. Some even predicted that the zone might spread.
But once the most intense radiation decayed, it was discovered that some species of wildlife had adapted and were beginning to reproduce (although others disappeared and some are not vigorous, particularly some kinds of birds). Yet other species migrated into this human-free environment.
When researchers checked remote camera traps that had been placed in the area, they were surprised to find images of bears, which had not been seen here for more than a century. A herd of Przewalski’s horses, an endangered subspecies of wild horse once considered extinct in the wild, grew to around 200—that is, until poachers reduced their number to about 60. Domestic dogs, now presumed feral, were also spotted.
According to an article in The New York Times, today in Chernobyl wolves rise up on their hind legs to peer through the windows of houses, looking for routes to the rooftops, convenient observation posts for hunting. Eagles build nests in fire towers. Beavers, forced out decades ago when the landscape was transformed for agriculture, have already undone much of our human works and restored one of central Europe’s great marshlands.
Who wouldn’t want to see this fascinating place?
On August 6, 1945, the first nuclear bomb to be used in war slightly missed its target—the Aioi Bridge—and detonated almost directly above the Genbaku Dome, now a World Heritage Site. ©Freedom II Andres, flickr
The ideal, natural world vs. the world we made
Chernobyl isn’t the only atomic tourism site. For example, Bikini Atoll, part of the Micronesia Islands, was the location of 23 U.S. atomic bomb tests from 1946 through 1958. The Bravo Test in 1954 was the most powerful bomb our nation ever detonated—much more destructive than predicted, resulting in widespread radioactive contamination.
Today, however, scuba divers can visit the atoll and explore its sunken fleet of 10 ships that were anchored in the lagoon during the nuclear tests. While the local government closed the atoll for tourism in 2008, some groups are still allowed to dive on the wrecks if they make arrangements with Bikini Atoll Divers.
Critics of atomic and nuclear tourism have commented that the tourist attractions and tours built around disasters promote insensitivity toward these tragic accidents and their victims. In Hiroshima, for example, when the Genbaku Dome (now known as the A-Bomb Dome) was registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List in December 1996, China suggested that the monument could be used to downplay the fact that the victim countries of Japan’s aggression suffered the greatest losses of life during the war.
Are atomic tours a form of adventure travel—or not? ©Roman Harak, flickr
Proponents of this new travel trend, however, believe that it’s time to start appreciating our planet—with its messy human history—as it is; not as some ideal wild and natural place that we wish it to be.
Would you ever consider going on an atomic tour? Do you think atomic tourism is just another form of thrill-seeking, adventure travel? Or are such trips insensitive and inconsiderate?
Here’s to your adventures, in whatever corner of the world you find them,
Candy
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