Chernobyl, Nearly 30 Years Since Catastrophe

PRIPYAT, UKRAINE - SEPTEMBER 29: An assistant holds up a photo showing the city of Pripyat's main square and the "Energetik" cultural center before 1986 at the same site that today is abandoned and overgrown with trees on September 29, 2015 in Pripyat, Ukraine. Pripyat lies only a few kilometers from the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant and was built in the 1970s to house the plant's workers and their families. On April 26, 1986, technicians at Chernobyl conducting a test inadvertently caused reactor number four to explode, sending plumes of highly radioactive particles and debris into the atmosphere. Authorities evacuated 120,000 people from the area, including 43,000 from Pripyat. Today Pripyat is a ghost-town, its apartment buildings, shops, restaurants, hospital, schools, cultural center and sports facilities derelict and its streets overgrown with trees. The city lies in the inner exclusion zone around Chernobyl where hot spots of persistently high levels of radiation make the area uninhabitable for thousands of years to come. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)