Anthony Bourdain at Chernobyl

1

Even the dust is radioactive. Still, the body wills itself to breathe.

Still, you and Zamir wander off the sidewalk and down a dirt path toward the rusted Ferris wheel. The trees are green. The sun shines.

You pass the Ferris wheel, the bumper cars ("My favorite," you say), then check the Geiger counter on a whim. It goes hysterical. Tick tick tick. Something breaks through your acerbic cool. Your voice goes high, "That's not good."

2

Everything is named after someone or something: the Geiger counter, the Sievert, the Ferris wheel. In Ukrainian, the literal translation of Chernobyl is "black grass." The name of the city is a reference to the mugwort that grows abundantly in the area. After the explosions, the nuclear fuel melted and flowed under the reactor like lava. They named the congealed remnants "the elephant's foot."

3

Marie Curie studied the ability of some forms of matter to spontaneously emit rays of energy. She called it radioactivity. She named the element polonium after her native country of Poland. She was born Maria Sklodowska. When she died, she was radioactive. Her casket was lined with lead.

4

I'm listening to a rebroadcast of a 2016 Fresh Air interview. You describe throwing pancake parties for your daughter and her friends. Choices of blueberry, chocolate chip, teddy bear, and "regular." I imagine you in your own kitchen, morning sunlight glancing off the marble counter. I'm jealous of the scene, the sunlight, the purity, your presence within it, your ability to whip up something utterly kind and sweet.

5

Liquidators arrived in Chernobyl after the evacuation, civil and military personnel. They cleaned up radioactive debris, destroyed and buried contaminated trees and equipment, hosed down streets, removed food from abandoned houses to prevent disease, and eventually built a sarcophagus around the reactor.

6

Radioactive elements and isotopes are inherently unsatisfied. A radioactive atom is constantly disintegrating into something unlike itself. It emits energetic particles, ejecting bits of its own structure in pursuit of stability. A nucleus is considered stable when it can't spontaneously transform into something else.

This process can take tens of thousands of years. Sometimes, no one knows how long it will take. The years may be innumerable. This is not surprising. Everything is always becoming something else. The only difference is timeframe.

7

I returned from Moscow in the summer of 1991, two weeks before the failed putsch that led to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. I was seventeen. The Soviet Union was almost sixty-nine years old. I came home with amber jewelry and t-shirts, souvenirs from GUM, the department store that faces Lenin's mausoleum in Red Square. His is the only dead body I've ever seen. Before I saw him, I had expected some decay, but he appeared perfectly preserved, waxen skin glowing in the dim light.

8

A mile from the reactor, no one but tourists and journalists visit the hospital in Pripyat. They photograph the peeling blue paint, the invading mold, the collapsed beds, and the encrusted medicine vials and hypodermic needles. The basement of the hospital, where the firefighters who responded to the explosions discarded their gear, is one of the most radioactive places in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

9

No one seems to know when Chernobyl will be safe. The half-life of cesium-137 is thirty years, which means half of it should have decayed by 2016. But even that has not gone as predicted.¹

10

A positive ion is an atom missing an electron. Ionizing radiation is so named because it can hit an atom so hard that it ejects an electron. It does the same to the atoms and molecules of the human body, damaging tissue as well as breaking chemical bonds within DNA. The Sievert and the rad are two measures of radiation exposure.

11

Your TV crew spent days in training to survive a war zone before filming in Kurdistan. There were fake wounds, false ambushes. The trainers shot through a cinder block wall with an AK-47...