Workers at the site told Reuters that Russian soldiers drove armored vehicles through the Red Forest-one of the most contaminated parts of the Exclusion Zone-kicking up clouds of radioactive dust. By the end of the day, they had taken control of the nuclear power plant, trapping more than 100 employees there. On February 24, Russian troops entered the Exclusion Zone from bordering Belarus. He was in the middle of planning his next trip when the Russian invasion turned the area around Chernobyl into a war zone. Over the intervening years, Orizaola returned to the Exclusion Zone four times and published multiple studies based on his research at the site. #Attention attention in russian chernobyl full“As soon as you arrive, then you see that it’s completely full of life,” says Orizaola, a zoologist at the Universidad de Oviedo in Spain. And in the surrounding forest there were moose, deer, foxes, raccoon dogs-all kinds of mammals. The situation in front of him told the opposite story: Every amphibian he’d come to collect was right there. While planning the trip, he’d heard other researchers talk about the zone as if it was an apocalyptic wasteland. Orizaola had come to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to collect tree frogs and find out whether living in the shadow of disaster had a lasting effect on the creatures’ genetics. The pond he was wading in was bursting with activity. In the middle of the night, the somber edifice glittered with lights.īut it was what was happening at his feet that really captured Orizaola’s attention. From 400 meters away, he could see the decaying concrete sarcophagus that had been hastily constructed over the ruined building in the months after the 1986 disaster. It was the spring of 2016 and the giant dome of steel and plastic that now covers the destroyed reactor was not yet in place. Germán Orizaola was standing in the shadow of Chernobyl Power Plant’s reactor Number Four-the epicenter of the worst nuclear accident ever.
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