It’s just a few months until the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident (26 April 1986). Elena Filatova, previously blogged here as The Kidd of Speed, has returned to the dead zone once again.
This time she documents some of the more remote areas of the highly radioactive areas, what she calls, the Land of the Wolves.
Check out the videos, which show some of the cleanup process of the reactor and sarcophagus after the meltdown. I found the footage taken by an unmanned camera of the two metre mass in the heart of the reactor to be quite interesting. Nicknamed the Elephant’s foot, it contains enough radiation to kill a person instantly.
- Video1: Shows clean up workers (nick named biorobots) on the roof of Unit # 3. (2mb wmv)
- Video2: footage that was taken deep in a basement of reactor N4 and shows the “Elephant’s Foot” (3mb wmv)
- Video3: shot of a helicopter dropping chemicals on the reactor (1.3mb wmv)
Expect to be hearing a lot about Chernobyl in the coming months. Twenty years after the fact, radiation levels are still too high to safely remain in the area for very long or to leave the road. Radioactivity in the plants and grass are much higher than levels on the highway.