Prypiat, Ukraine

I was playing a computer game, Call of Duty 4, when I noticed references to an ex-Soviet, now Ukrainian, town called Prypiat. In the game you play a British soldier on a mission in the 1980s, and it is mentioned that before the Chernobly disaster 50,000 people lived in the abandoned city. I was 13 when the disaster happened, and apart from concerns
about whether the radiation was powerful enough to affect our lives, it hadn't occured to me at the time that Ukrainian lives, especially in the area immediately surrounding Chernobyl, were completely ruined. Of course we saw images on TV of children affected by radiation, but the extent had never really hit home. Until now. You see, in the game Prypiat is depicted as a ghost city, a place of desolation which makes your heart sink, much like Druids Heath but without humans. So I wondered whether the city in the game was real. I went to uncle Google and typed 'Pripiat' and, lo and behold, the hits were in their millions. Apparently, the city was built for workers of the nuclear station and is now included into the 'Zone of Alienation', a 30km zone around Chernobyl which is heavily contaminated and whose population was evacuated after the 1986 disaster. The following videos are a harrowing account of the aftermath, and a warning to our 'enlightened' leaders who insist on switching to nuclear power as a source of energy. The third video is a comparison of real photos of Prypiat and the computer game.