Cloaked in darkness and camouflage, they navigate miles of irradiated forest, sleep in abandoned villages, and watch the sunrise unfurl over Pripyat's crumbling Brezhnev baroque rooftops. Over the past decade, an increasing number of self-proclaimed “stalkers” regularly enter the zone illegally. Thirty-one years after being designated a dead zone, the living roam its corridors once again. ( Read more about the Chernobyl disaster.) Its ruination has become a symbol of the failed utopian ideals of the Soviet Union, a warning of humanity’s capacity to wreak ecological havoc, and a reminder of both our fragility and resilience. Today, the 30-kilometer radius around the most contaminated area-the exclusion zone-is a mausoleum of man’s technological folly. Weightless, odorless, and invisible to the human eye, it has leached into the ground and swept across the anguished landscape. An estimated 200 tons of radioactive material festers beneath a steel containment structure inside Chernobyl, the site of the worst nuclear catastrophe in history.
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