Ukraine Plans to Open Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster Site to Tourism Next Year
Chernobyl's Reactor No. 4 Redrat72 via Wikimedia If the typical beach vacation - the one where you spend several days on the beach reading bad fiction and soaking up sun - has lost its allure, the Ukraine would like to make a suggestion: come soak up radiation and some real human drama at Chernobyl, the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history. Starting in 2011, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant site and the surrounding "exclusion zone" will be opened to tourists for the first time since the plant's reactor No. 4 exploded on April 26, 1986, blanketing the area in radiation. The Chernobyl disaster, for those who aren't old enough to have watched it unfold, left a large part of northern Europe under some degree of radiation threat. The worst-hit areas, of course, were the ones closest to the reactor itself; a 30-mile radius around the site was declared an...