Check in for a stay in Chernobyl

The Ukrainian government has opened a hostel in the inhabitable Chernobyl exclusion zone.

The new accommodation is set in a former Soviet dormitory and about nine miles (14km) from the site of the nuclear disaster that destroyed the area in 1986.

Visitors are allowed into the exclusion zone that covers 1,000 sq miles (2,590 sq km) in the north of the country, but only if they have been granted permission and only for short periods.

The area, within which the abandoned city of Pripyat is perhaps best known, is still deemed highly contaminated with radioactive material, but has become increasingly popular with tourists who take tours from Kiev.

Svetlana Grishchenko, a state administrator, said that the hostel has 50 beds and that there are plans to expand it to accommodate 102 people. The first guests this week included tourists from the United States, New Zealand and Denmark. The hostel is not the only place in which to stay, with a number of formerly dilapidated buildings now offering acceptable rooms.

One such is Hotel Pripyat, of which tour operator Chornobyl Tour says: “All the rooms are simple, in the Soviet style. All the visitors are provided with the ironed, starched linen stamped Chernobyl Special Industrial Complex, some soap and a towel”.

It adds that there is a radio that “seems to broadcast from the past about achievements of regional farms in the Ivankov district.”

Chernobyl’s reactor remains under a concrete and steel sarcophagus, in which 16 tons of uranium and plutonium, and 30 tons of highly contaminated dust are trapped. Experts say the area will not be fully habitable for 20,000 years.