BBC Earth
Image: skpy
It is almost 30 years to the day since Chernobyl became synonymous with nuclear disaster.
In the early hours of 26 April 1986, an experiment designed to investigate the safety of the nuclear reactor went badly wrong. Radiation spilled into the environment.
Within weeks, hundreds of thousands of people in a 30km exclusion zone around the plant had been evacuated. To this day the zone remains largely uninhabited.
It is far from lifeless, though. Visit the exclusion zone today – which some bold tourists do – and you will find that the local wildlife is thriving.
The big question: does this mean that the environment can cope with a nuclear disaster even on the scale of Chernobyl? Read more on the BBC Earth website…
