Great photos, man!

Awesome trip and great pics!

Did you have to do any additional monitoring for your job, or is it like NNPP dose where they only care about whatever you receive from their reactors?

Great photos OP.  Thanks for posting.  I wanted to go there and do the military weapon firing tour while I was in Kiev but sadly, I didn't have time to go.

Nice, I do non nuclear things at a nuclear powerplant and find the big fuckups interesting and neat.

They won't care about external dose, but they would care about internal dose. At Chernobyl, they did do an internal count going in and on the way out to ensure you didn't pick up internal dose. You had to sit in these chairs for 10 minutes.

Thanks all. I'm working on the mess of random other shit I snapped and I'll post in a bit. Might need help with some translation to confirm what I think.

That's really neat. Thanks for sharing OP. Awesome photos.

Attached File

Excellent pics, OP.  Thanks for posting those and describing everything.  That would be fascinating to see all that in person.

OST

Great pictures OP! And a nice realistic estimate of how much radiation you get on a visit there.

Was any talking about the potential Russian invasion?

I asked my guide and she said "We have the same thing for 7 years. Those troops have been there a long time." She said she was a bit worried, but also not. I didn't get sense from being around the people that they were worried about anything, but I wouldn't understand them if they were. What you don't see in the St Catherine Christmas tree photo, for example, is that it was PACKED with people. I photographed above all their heads.

She also talked about: Liking Trump. Hating BLM. Thinking American men are becoming too feminine but come to her country expecting to pick up the women, who like the men to be men. She said "women are supposed to look good, but American men spend too much time in the mirror." I asked her what her screen name was.

Fantastic thread OP.  Glad you decided to go.   Did you get to see the giant catfish in the river?  Any other wildlife besides the fox?  

A friend of mine went a few years back and had very similar pics.   He also said you could rent full auto mgs and even shoot an rpg for the right price lol

Thanks for sharing

Very cool, thanks for the pics and write ups.

I didn't go to the catfish thing, I wasn't that interested. Saw a moose, but by the time we pulled over, it was too deep into the woods to get a good shot. Lots of dogs. We also saw a gaggle of horses, but I didn't bother trying to photograph them either. Daylight was short.

I have a pick coming up in the "clean up" post related to shooting (not mine).

I snuck around that area a long time ago when I was a sniper with the SAS. I also remember fighting around that ferris wheel while waiting for extraction. Ahh the good ole days....

Tagged. Fucking awesome.

Someone here recommended Midnight In Chernobyl and I've been hooked ever since I finished it.

I keep kicking myself for not going on a tour back in 2016 when I visited the fam. Fuuuuuu….

Glad you had fun. Please don’t do that to limerick.
I can help you translate russian and ukranian, if you need to.

I really enjoyed your pictures and write ups, there is something that draws me to these russian old military buildings and Chenybol. there was a few people that did this with the decommissioned (abandoned) nuclear subs and weapons.

have you seen those pictures from the girl that went deep into that plant?

No, got a link?

Very cool.

Amazing photos, thank you for sharing!

Nice. I'm 45 and single right now... if I were 10 years younger, but where I am professionally right now, I would probably seriously look into finding me a good Ukranian woman.

I recently met a Russian woman who immigrated about 5 years ago. Went on a date, had great conversation. Didn't get too deep into anything political or COVID, but she thought the mask and vax stuff was pure bullshit, so I think we would have had a lot in common there. We were both military brats, and apparently Russian servicemen move around a lot, too.

I thought we hit it off... but she ghosted me a few days later. She had mentioned she may have to move down to SA (from Austin) because the cost of living was getting too high.

Epic thread. I live vicariously through your trip. Ain't no fuckin' way I will ever get there!

Incredible. I've been obsessed with Chernobyl since roughly 2001 when I was in high school. I've read every book I can find on the subject, and several also just on nuclear science. I highly recommend Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey, Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, and Chernobyl 01:23:40 by Andrew Leatherbarrow. I would absolutely love to make that trip some day, but I don't particularly want to be anywhere near the Ukraine right now. If you only read one of these books, read the Mahaffey book - not just about Chernobyl but it was one of the absolute most interesting books I've ever read, and I've read a lot of them.

Did you happen to see a flying squirrel, and a brunette looking for them?

OMG she ranted at dinner in our hotel in Chernobyl about covid and mandates to the point of dropping F bombs. Should would surely fit in here lol.

Epic. Thank you.

Will do, thank you.

If she was hot, I'm single! :P  

Great stuff, thx for posting

10/10 would suck cherries out of her ass.

Awesome pics OP... no where are the pics of the woman that you're there for/with?

I was impressed with her knowledge of the area and on a wide variety of topics. She's been "in the zone" over 600 times giving tours lol. She's been contaminated twice, showed me the videos of the detectors going off.

Do you taste metal?

great pics!! thanks for sharing!

Wow!  Thank you so much for sharing.  Absolutely incredible.

Awesome pics! Thanks for sharing.

Amazing. Can you tell us what you are looking at here? That looks like a display of US nukes/ICBMs? What was the purpose?

EDIT: I saw your caption on second read through. Any idea WHY they had those missiles displayed there?

Absolutely stunning & such a fascinating close up view of such a legendary disaster!  Thank you for sharing.

OK here's some more pics that I didn't use originally for one reason or another. Generally in order of the first 3 posts..., Kiev to Chernobyl to Duga to Pripyat.


I took a bunch more pics of that statue because the longer you looked at it, the more funny little details popped out.

JEC01232 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr

JEC01235 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr

JEC01238 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr

JEC01244 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr

JEC01247 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


This was the tile flooring in the emergency diesel generator room of the Chernobyl bunker. I just loved that the SOVIETS cared about such detail in an emergency bunker.

JEC01292 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


More Chernobyl 4 instrumentation in the computer room. I didn't note it in the original posts, but the computer room for Chernobyl 3 and 4 came before the control room of Chernobyl 3, and thus, wasn't affected by the explosion really at all, so it's mostly intact.

JEC01334 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr

JEC01337 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


A neat key in Chernobyl 3 control room, and what I assumed to be the "keys to the reactor" (like we have in the US) but I couldn't find where it went to confirm, so I didn't post it. The guide didn't know either.

JEC01388 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


A spot of color in the Chernobyl 3 control room.

JEC01382 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


These next couple are detail shots of the reactor control panel posted in the original posts. These are rod in and out switches, I believe, because they spring back to middle. I think their panel works like our panels and they could individually select a rod and use these switches to move it depending on core hemisphere or quadrant (which is what I think the label would indicate if it was intact). Can anyone translate?


A side note that I didn't mention before about the reactor control panel, while everyone else was distracted, including the security person, I was pretty sure their individual rod select buttons worked like ours, and I was right. I was able to remove one. I held it in my hand, smiled, and then put it back. A piece of me wanted to take it as a souvenir, and I would have been able to, but I'm not a thief. I was happy knowing I could figure out ancient rusky controls pretty quickly.

JEC01391 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


I believe this is what we call the "in hold out" lever in the USA. Another control rod movement device, but I believe this would allow them to perform banked movement.

JEC01394 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


I took this to try to later figure out which one was the watt meter like shown on the HBO series, but those piece of paper cover up the actual label and say their use is discontinued or something like that. So, I didn't post it because I'm not sure what they are.

JEC01412 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


A close up view of the Chernobyl 4 "full core" display that's left. When I say full core display, it shows where each fuel rod is, numbed 25-45, for example, and the different control rods, like the one in green would have a control rod type that corresponded to green on their legend.

JEC01457 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


If you walk into the control room of a USA BWR, you will see very similar displays and controls. The full core display is on the vertical panel, and you can see the mimic of it on the horizontal panel, and surrounding that, the controls for the control roods. Very similar to Chernobyl's.




Just a plant light. A little detail I found interesting compared to what I'm used to.

JEC01466 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


A closer view of the memorial.

JEC01475 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr



Unless people are the subject of my photos, I abhor people in my photos, but I snapped this one to give context to the size of the motors of the recirc pumps.

JEC01484 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


Inside the cabin of the refueling machine.

JEC01514 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


Although most of the city of Chernobyl is abandoned, there are some buildings decontaminated an in use by plant workers and zone workers. People working in the zone do a rotation of something like 15 days in, 15 days out. While in, they stay in some of the dormitories and apartments around the center of town. This old dormitory was converted into the hotel we stayed in. Small rooms, communal bathroom. But my god, the cook. The cook, bless my mother's heart, makes some of the best food I've had. I never would have imagined in a million years that the best fried eggs I've ever had would have been in the middle of a nuclear wasteland. Among everything else she made.

JEC01535 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


This was taken to show that in Chernobyl, the pipe carrying water are above ground now because they cannot dig into the ground because of the contamination. All over the city these pipes cross, and then they're elevated above roads and alleys.

JEC01541 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr

Supposedly one of the last 2 Lenin statues in Ukraine. Both happen to be in the exclusion zone.

JEC01550 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


Pripyat port showing now sinking barges that were used to carry away the top soil they scraped up in the months following the accident. A lot of good it did since the area is still highly contaminated and in some places getting worse as new growth pulls buried contamination back to the surface.

JEC01556 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


As a sailor, I appreciated this "guard rail" along the road near the port.

JEC01559 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


Another of view of the robots.

JEC01565 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


I just liked these benches behind the Duga soldier barracks. SOVIETS gave their guys a place to hang out and smoke and have camp fires.

JEC01586 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


Another of the "how to be a soldier" signs.

JEC01598 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


The building I believe to have house a power plant for the radar itself, and I believe the firehouse mini map confirms. But it's been stripped and I didn't think interesting enough to post before. This is where the can of pork is.

JEC01646 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr

Behind the radar is a very long building which once house the giant runs of cables to each array on the radar. This is a couple hundred meter long cable tunnel. Of course, all that copper was gathered up for reuse.

JEC01658 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


Another shot of the mini map.

JEC01703 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


Last remaining fall colors in this nuclear wasteland.

JEC01724 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


Log play huts at the Duga kindergarten in remarkably good condition.

JEC01727 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


This was an attempt to capture a swing set being retaken by nature, but as you can see, the trees make it very "busy" so I didn't use it before.

JEC01739 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


Another detail that caught my eye in the Duga community center/movie theater.

JEC01763 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


This was an attempt to get the exterior of the Duga community center and its mural, but again, the trees kind of distract from it.

JEC01784 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


This is just in some random kindergarten in a small village between Chernobyl and Pripyat. Didn't want to give nightmares.

JEC01805 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


Random hot spot posting.

JEC01868 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


This was in a room in the bottom of the Palace of Culture.

JEC01898 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr


Finally, a liqudator truck graveyard. Again, something highly contaminated just out in the open for you to go get up close with.

JEC01937 by JustinC's Photos, on Flickr

The guide said it was the training center for the radar complex, and the third photo is taken from a podium. I suppose they were there to teach the Ruskies about US missiles.

Pretty cool. But reminds me why I don’t want socialism/communism here.

"Bryukhanov...the air is glowing!"