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Burying Chernobyl

Burying Chernobyl: Episode 2: Returning to Pripyat

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Episode 2

Episode 2: Returning to Pripyat

Returning to Pripyat

BBC Radio 4 - Burying Chernobyl, Returning to Pripyat

Alla Alban returns to her former home near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

After a tour of the Safety Confinement project at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, Alla Alban travels to the nearby deserted town of Pripyat, which she used to call home.

In the second part of her trip back to Chernobyl, Alla Alban, the daughter of two former employees at the power station, returns to the nearby town of Pripyat. Now a world famous ghost town with trees growing through the once neat concrete squares and streets, it used to be her hometown. 

As well as an emotional journey back, Alla also talks to other people dealing with the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. Dr Yevgenia Stepanova runs the National Research Centre for Radiation Medicine in Kiev. For her the disaster is ongoing with second generation children still needing all the help that a struggling nation can afford.

She also talks to Ighor Gramotkin the Director General of the Chernobyl plant who arrived in 1988 and has spent his entire working life dealing with the problems left by the catastrophic mistakes made in 1986. 

Professor Timothy Mouseau heads the Chernobyl Research initiative, an attempt to make some detailed sense of the impact the accident had on humans and the plant and animal life within the exclusion zone.

Alla asks them about their reading of the situation and whether the old slogan that still stands above the main square in Pripyat still applies, that the atom should be 'a worker not a soldier'.

But at the heart of the programme is a journey back to a place which feels as though it has been robbed of its innocent memories; hanging out with friends, attending concerts that would change a life and being part of a community that was to be ripped apart.

Producer: Tom Alban.

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The daughter of a former Chernobyl engineer returns to her father's workplace

The daughter of a former Chernobyl engineer returns to her father's workplace, as the huge mobile sarcophagus built to cover the damaged reactor nears completion.

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Episode 2: Returning to Pripyat

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