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This Is What the Chernobyl Disaster Site Looks Like Now

Photographer Philip Grossman has documented the abandoned landscape of Chernobyl's "exclusion zone" for over a decade. Here's what he found.

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Chernobyl
Courtesy Philip Grossman

What was Chernobyl, anyway?

If you need a refresher on what happened at Chernobyl, here’s the history: The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union, is the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history. It all started at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, when a routine safety test at the plant went horribly wrong. A bad combination of faulty design and human error caused one of the four nuclear reactors to overheat and explode, starting a fire and spewing radioactive material into the air. To this day, the site contains harmful levels of radiation, making Chernobyl—and the 1,600 square-mile “exclusion zone” surrounding it—one of the world’s most dangerous tourist destinations.

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Chernobyl
Courtesy Philip Grossman

Who is Philip Grossman?

Long before he visited Chernobyl, photographer Philip Grossman witnessed a nuclear disaster right in his own backyard. “I … grew up 11 miles from the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant” in Pennsylvania, he says. “I was in the third grade when the accident happened there and remember it vividly.” While Grossman studied architecture and civil engineering in college, he was always drawn to photography. In 2010, he decided to combine his passions by documenting what Chernobyl looks like today. These photos are just a fraction of the images he has captured after nearly a decade of expeditions to the exclusion zone.

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chernobyl control room 4
Courtesy Phillip Grossman

Control Room 4 (before)

On Grossman’s first trip to the Chernobyl plant, he had the rare opportunity to visit Control Room 4—or what he calls “the epicenter of the catastrophe.” There were five people working in this room when the reactor exploded, he says.

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control room 4 chernobyl
Courtesy Phillip Grossman

Control Room 4 (after)

Grossman has since returned to the exclusion zone nearly a dozen times, spending over 100 days exploring and photographing the site of the infamous disaster. “The more I learned about what happened and the effect it had on people, the more I wanted to learn about the catastrophe,” he says. “It became a passion project for me very quickly.”

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

The operating room (before)

Touring the hospital where the injured engineers and firefighters were treated during the initial hours of the 1986 accident “had a big impact” on Grossman.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

The operating room (after)

The explosion, which was over 400 times larger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, killed an initial 30 people and sickened dozens more with radiation poisoning. During one of Grossman’s expeditions, an ambulance driver who brought the first patients to the emergency room described how the injured were triaged before being sent to another hospital in Moscow. If that isn’t enough to give you the willies, check out more creepy (but real) ghost towns around the world.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

District 4 of Pripyat (before)

The city of Chernobyl itself was home to about 14,000 people at the time of the accident, but many more lived in the nearby city of Pripyat, which was founded in 1970 as a community for the nuclear plant’s employees and their families.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

District 4 of Pripyat (after)

When Grossman saw the exclusion zone for the first time, “it was completely surreal,” he says. “The city of Pripyat was so overgrown, and the buildings were collapsing.” This aerial shot shows one of Pripyat’s four micro-districts, home to about 50,000 people in 1986.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

School in Pripyat (before)

In 1986, the city had 15 elementary and five secondary schools, with nearly 12,000 students enrolled. “They were told at a moment’s notice that they had to prepare to leave for a day or two and had about one hour to prepare,” Grossman says.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

School in Pripyat (after)

Visiting the abandoned classrooms in Pripyat was another experience that left a mark on Grossman. As it turned out, the residents of Pripyat never returned. Though tourists may visit the area for short periods of time, it’s estimated that Chernobyl won’t be inhabitable for at least 20,000 more years.

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Chernobyl reactor control room
Courtesy Philip Grossman

Reactor control room (before)

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had four nuclear reactors when the accident occurred. Two more reactors were under construction at the time, and one was even scheduled for completion by the end of 1986.

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Chernobyl Reactor-Control-Room
Courtesy Philip Grossman

Reactor control room (after)

Despite the risks, the other three reactors remained in operation until the plant was finally shut down in 2000—nearly 15 years after the disaster. Chernobyl’s engineers worked five-hour shifts and spent half of each month outside the exclusion zone to keep their radiation exposure low, according to Esquire.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

Hotel Polissya (before)

Hotel Polissya in Pripyat once hosted the frequent and esteemed guests who visited the plant during the 1970s and 1980s.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

Hotel Polissya (after)

After the accident, however, it housed people overseeing the “liquidation” or clean-up of the city, Grossman says. Grossman himself stays in a hotel in the city of Chernobyl during his trips to the exclusion zone. When he visits the site, he carries a dosimeter to track his radiation exposure, as well as a Geiger counter to measure the radiation coming from other objects.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

Pripyat bus station (before)

The bus station pictured here is located just a few hundred meters from the Pripyat city limits, Grossman says. Although officials initially told residents that the effects of the disaster were minimal, that turned out to be one of the biggest lies in history.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

Pripyat bus station (after)

It took at least 24 hours before the Soviet government began evacuating the nearby communities after the explosion. Because many residents did not have cars, more than 300,000 people were transported away from the contaminated area on buses instead.

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swimming pool Chernobyl
Courtesy Philip Grossman

Natatorium Lazurny (before)

Located in the third district of Pripyat, Natatorium Lazurny was the largest of the city’s two swimming pools. 

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Chernobyl swimming pool
Courtesy Philip Grossman

Natatorium Lazurny (after)

The pool actually remained open for swimmers during the city’s clean-up in 1986, Grossman says. In the ten years since his project was launched, Grossman’s photos have been featured in several gallery shows in New York, a solo exhibition at the United Nations for the 30th anniversary of the catastrophe, and a show on the Discover Science Channel hosted by Grossman himself.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

Amusement park (before)

This Ferris wheel is among the most iconic features of the city of Pripyat, according to Grossman. It was part of a new amusement park that was scheduled to open during May Day celebrations—just days after the accident.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

Amusement park (after)

Members of the Communist Party had already enjoyed an exclusive tour of the park only a few weeks before. Little did they know that they would be the last ones to see it; after the disaster at Chernobyl, the park was abandoned along with the rest of Pripyat.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

City Center of Pripyat (before)

At the end of the one-kilometer long Lenin Avenue sits Pripyat’s city center, once a grand promenade with a public clubhouse called “Energetik” at its heart.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

City Center of Pripyat (after)

The center would later become the gathering place for thousands of the city’s residents before they were evacuated, according to Grossman. Today, overgrown trees and grass cover most of the landscape, surrounding dilapidated and collapsing buildings.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

ChNPP Admin Building (before)

The original name for the plant was the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station. Now it is more commonly known as the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, or ChNPP for short.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

ChNPP Admin Building (after)

The plant’s administrative building, located east of the nuclear reactors, was used as an emergency bunker and command center for workers as they struggled to contain the fallout from the explosion, Grossman says.

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turbine Chernobyl
Courtesy Philip Grossman

Turbine Hall (before)

The 600-meter-long Turbine Hall runs along the front of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and houses the generators that once fed electricity to the cooling pumps for the plant’s nuclear reactors. Each generator is a whopping 128 feet long and weighs over two million pounds, according to Grossman.

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turbine Chernobyl
Courtesy Philip Grossman

Turbine Hall (after)

While it used to boast some of the most state-of-the-art technology for the time, Turbine Hall has been left to decay over the decades.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

Pripyat post office (before)

Believe it or not, this is no ordinary post office; it also served as Pripyat’s telecommunications center before the accident.

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Courtesy Phillip Grossman

Pripyat post office (after)

The Pripyat Phone Company operated approximately 2,926 local phones inside this building, and another 1,950 were owned by the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Complex, according to Grossman. Now that you have peeked inside one of the most dangerous places in the world, don’t miss these other forbidden places no one will ever be allowed to visit.

You can find more of photographer Philip Grossman’s work at philipgrossman.com; he’s on Twitter @pgpimages, and on Instagram at pgp.images.

Brooke Nelson Alexander
Brooke is a tech and consumer products writer covering the latest in digital trends, product reviews, security and privacy, and other news and features for Reader's Digest. She's a two-time Emmy-nominated reporter with nearly 10 years of publishing experience, and her work has been recognized by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association.