These used to be bustling Ukrainian towns full of the sound of cars workers families.
Now they're ghost towns, quiet, run-down, deserted.
What happened here was one of the worst man-made disasters in history.
In the early hours of Saturday 26th of April 1986
engineers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine were doing a routine test.
They were checking the systems designed to keep the power plant safe during a blackout
but a bunch of mistakes along with a flaw in the reactor's design meant it all went horribly wrong.
The 1,000 ton steel lid - the same weight as three passenger planes - blew right off reactor four.
The explosion and a big fire sent dangerous radioactive air and materials streaming out
over surrounding areas. But in the days after, the rest of the world would be kept in the dark.
You see, Ukraine was part of the USSR, also known as the Soviet Union. In size, it was the biggest
country on earth made up of a group of states controlled from Russia and stretching across
large parts of europe and asia. The Soviet Union was also communist which meant its government kept
tight control over the Soviet people, their freedoms and their access to news and information.
And it worried an accident like this would make it look bad.
[radio announcer] In Sweden, about 600 people were evacuated...
But monitoring stations in Sweden noticed there were unusually high levels of radiation in the wind.
At first, they thought they'd been a meltdown at a Swedish
nuclear plant. But then they realised where it was coming from and the secret was out.
"It's now clear that the soviet union has suffered one of the worst disasters in the history of nuclear power."
The Soviet Union evacuated hundreds of surrounding towns including nearby Pripyat which was home
to 30,000 people. It sent in what it called liquidators who were firefighters, plant workers
and locals that helped to contain the area and cover up the exposed reactor core - but they were
exposed to dangerous levels of radiation in the process. In the beginning, without even realizing
it. In fact, Chernobyl released more radiation into the air than the two atomic bombs dropped on japan
during World War II. And it's thought thousands of people have got sick and even died in the years
after because of radiation poisoning.
[Radio Announcer] The wind blew a cloud of radiation over the baltic states...
It also had a global impact as radiation spread on the wind as far as Germany, France and the UK.
And lots of crops, livestock and forests were contaminated
And many people started to question the safety of nuclear power. The fallout also had a huge impact
on the Soviet Union. There were investigations into what went wrong and many soviet people started
questioning the government more forcing it to be less secretive. In 1991 the soviet union came to
an end but, 35 years on, the exclusion zone created around Chernobyl remains frozen in time. Radiation
sticks around for hundreds of years which is why these towns are still mostly abandoned... besides the
odd tour group visiting for short periods of time... and plenty of animals enjoying the lack of people.
The nuclear plant actually kept running until 2010 when the last reactor was shut down. And
in the past few years, it's been made safer with a better structure to keep the radiation in.
But as the 35th anniversary of Chernobyl was commemorated in both Russia and Ukraine there's
no forgetting the impact this disaster has had and will continue to have for many many years to come.