HBO series on nuclear disaster brings new life to stricken area
HBO series on nuclear disaster brings new life to stricken area
● Walking along the top of Lithuania’s decommissioned nuclear reactor, the set of HBO’s Chernobyl TV series, tourist Vytas Miknaitis says he’s not “afraid at all”.
“They know what they’re doing,” the retired computer engineer from Chicago says, referring to organisers of the three-hour tour of the Ignalina power station in eastern Lithuania.
Similar in design to Chernobyl, 450km away, the Ignalina reactor provided the backdrop for the show’s outdoor scenes, shot last year. The Baltic state’s only nuclear power plant, built in Soviet times, was open to the public before the Chernobyl drama first aired in May but has seen an uptick in visitors on the heels of the show’s success.
Tourists don white overalls, walk on top of the reactor and tour the various work stations, including a command post built to resemble the one in the series. They can even pretend to be the protagonists pushing the various buttons.
Ignalina plant spokesperson Natalija Survila-Glebova said the series had attracted a new stream of visitors, mostly Lithuanians but also foreign tourists from countries like Poland, Latvia and the UK. Last month, there were 900 visitors, she said, adding that tours were “almost completely booked through to the end of the year”.
The Soviet Union’s Chernobyl plant, in what is now Ukraine, was the scene of the world’s worst nuclear disaster when one of its reactors exploded in 1986 during testing.
It polluted a big part of Europe, with the area immediately around the power plant the worst affected.
In recent years, the abandoned site has become a “dark tourism” destination, even before the eponymous TV drama that has picked up 19 Emmy nominations.
Lithuania, also a former Soviet republic, began decommissioning Ignalina in December 2009. The EU made its closure a condition of the country’s 2004 entry into the bloc as the plant had two reactors that were the same model as those at Chernobyl.
Chernobyl tours have also sprung up in other parts of Lithuania where the series was filmed, including the capital, Vilnius.
Visitor Vytautas Kastanauskas, who works in tourism and experienced Soviet times, marvelled at how the producers were
The series has affected us deeply Ieva Nagyte
Vilnius Academy of Arts
able to recast parts of the picturesque city as a Soviet-era industrial outpost.
“The atmosphere of the time and the nature of the relationships between people, everything was recreated perfectly in the series,” he says.
Jurate Pazikaite, of the Vilnius Film Office, says that the series has “focused a lot of attention” on the city, putting it on the map as a prime location for filmmakers.
But the Chernobyl series is not only generating curiosity and pride in Lithuania. It has also fed into unease over a new nuclear plant, set to open in neighbouring Belarus.
Spearheaded by the Russian state energy corporation Rosatom, the plant is expected to go online later this year.
Lithuania says the facility in the northwestern Belarusian town of Ostrovets, 20km from its border, does not meet safety standards. Minsk rejects the claim.
“The Chernobyl series has affected us deeply. My friends and I talk about this topic [nuclear risk],” says Ieva Nagyte, who works at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. “If the Ostrovets nuclear reactors exploded, I’m not sure we’d know what to do.”
However, Lithuanian authorities are preparing for the worst — they have stockpiled iodine tablets used to ward off certain forms of radiation poisoning, established evacuation routes and are testing emergency sirens, according to the internal affairs ministry.