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The Documentary: Burying Chernobyl: Burying Chernobyl - Part Two

Pripyat, Ukraine

20/01/2016 GMT

Burying Chernobyl - Part Two

Burying Chernobyl

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Burying Chernobyl, Burying Chernobyl - Part Two

Alla Kravchuk returns to Pripyat, Ukraine, now a ghost town following Chernobyl

Alla Kravchuk returns to Pripyat, Ukraine, now a ghost town following the Chernobyl disaster and talks to the people dealing with the aftermath.

In the second part of her trip back to Chernobyl, Alla Kravchuk, 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'.

(Photo: A photo showing the city of Pripyat's main square and the 'Polissya' hotel before 1986, and the same site that today is abandoned and overgrown with trees. Credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

The Documentary: Burying Chernobyl

Alla Kravchuk returns to Ukraine as the huge sarcophagus built to cover the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor nears completion.

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