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40 years on from the world’s worst nuclear disaster, what's Chernobyl really like today?

40 years on from the world’s worst nuclear disaster, what's Chernobyl really like today?

On 26 April 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. Parts of the site, polluted with radioactive elements that take centuries to decay, will remain lethal for millennia. Journalist Adam Higginbotham, who has visited on multiple occasions, tells Jonathan Wright about what Chernobyl is like today, and its fascinating contradictions

Composite image of the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor alongside control room panels and workers monitoring instruments.

Jonathan Wright

Published: April 26, 2026 at 7:00 AM

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It was as a reporter for The Observer that Adam Higginbotham first visited the exclusion zone that surrounds the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. Working on a piece to mark the 20th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear accident, he wanted to see at first hand where the disaster had occurred.

Higginbotham also wanted to interview eyewitnesses, which is how he came to visit the Moscow apartment of Alexander and Natalia Yuvchenko. A 24-year-old mechanical engineer, Alexander was working on the night of the explosion. “He described seeing this pillar of ethereal blue-white light extending up from the ruins of reactor number four and disappearing into infinity in the sky,” says Higginbotham.

It was, Yuvchenko remembered, a beautiful sight, a sharp contrast to the ugliness the disaster left in its wake. That devastation is what confronted Higginbotham when he first visited Chernobyl in “the dead of winter”, in 2006.

What is Chernobyl like now?

During the shortest days of the year, modern-day Chernobyl is “incredibly grim”, says Higginbotham. “Everything is in monochrome tones of grey and black. The clouds seem to descend crushingly towards the horizon. There’s very bleak light. And the landscape around the plant – certainly when I went there 20 years ago – was like a stereotypical vision of a post-apocalyptic landscape.”

It’s an image Higginbotham drew on for Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, a book that takes his first-hand experience of the site and plunges into the story of the disaster.

Rusting Ferris wheel and abandoned amusement park structures in Pripyat, surrounded by overgrown trees.

The iconic Ferris wheel of Pripyat stands still within encroaching forest as the site takes on a renewed vulnerability amid ongoing conflict in the region. (Photo by Getty Images)

On this first visit, Higginbotham saw the concrete sarcophagus that covered reactor number four, constructed in the wake of the disaster to contain the radiation. He likens the structure to “a medieval conception of a prison designed to imprison the devil himself”, all “sharp angles and rusting steel”. Nearby, massive pylons that long ago shed their power lines stretched out into the distance. “The landscape itself is very frightening before you start even to entertain the idea there are hot spots of radiation here and there, the location of which you won’t know until your dosimeter [a device to measure radiation] goes off.”

Happier days before disaster

Many who lived in Pripyat, the now-abandoned city founded in 1970 to house workers at the nuclear plant, have fond memories of their former lives there. On another visit to the site, this time on a balmy spring day in 2016, Higginbotham came to understand why.

“The location of Pripyat was in this magnificently sylvan environment. It was a town built on the banks of a river with sandy beaches and a pier.”

Now, he says, some of that beauty has returned. “It’s a really verdant landscape when you go in the spring and summer, and particularly many years after the nuclear accident when the whole area has been overgrown and reclaimed by nature. All the trees were blossoming. There were birds and butterflies in the air. It was a really beautiful place to be.”

At one point during this visit, Higginbotham was exploring a courtyard surrounded by apartment buildings. Stopping to take notes, he got separated from his guide and the rest of his party. “We were the only people in the city, but the three people I was with had completely vanished,” he says. “For that moment, I just had a really terrifying vision of what it would be like to be the last person on Earth in this ghost town in the middle of nowhere that’s been reclaimed by nature.”

View from a decaying room in an abandoned building in Pripyat, with broken floors, debris, and trees growing through the interior, overlooking empty apartment blocks.

Inside the abandoned city of Pripyat, nature slowly reclaims the ruins left after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Photographed in 2026, this view from a derelict building captures the long-term aftermath of nuclear catastrophe and the its strange present, as the site remains vulnerable amid ongoing conflict. (Photo by Getty Images)

The myth of the Soviet Homer Simpsons

As to what caused Pripyat to be abandoned, the explosion at Chernobyl occurred when, ironically, a safety test went wrong. In the immediate wake of the disaster, the Soviet authorities lionised first responders for their bravery. In contrast, those who worked at the plant were, in Higginbotham’s estimation, portrayed as “butterfinger morons in the control room… who were given a perfectly serviceable piece of brilliantly designed Soviet equipment, and they destroyed it by their incompetence”.

As Midnight in Chernobyl makes clear, this was far from true. While the safety test was certainly carried out by “people who were not well informed about the test protocol”, many workers at the plant “knowingly went into incredibly dangerous situations in order to try to mitigate the effects of the accident”. For their troubles, they were scapegoated to divert attention from glaring design faults in the reactors – and from the Soviet nuclear industry’s failings more generally.

This approach might have been more effective had Mikhail Gorbachev not ushered in glasnost – a new policy of state transparency. As articles about Chernobyl appeared, “the Soviet people began to get a really worrying notion of exactly how corrupt the state they lived in had been, and how they had been lied to about the state of Soviet technology.”

Gorbachev later blamed Chernobyl for the dissolution of the USSR. In Higginbotham’s view, this was a self-serving take. Far more important, he says, was the effect of the disaster on Gorbachev’s thinking. Seeing Chernobyl as evidence of how rotten the Soviet system had become, a man who essentially wanted “to bring about a purer Soviet state” hastily pushed through reforms “that destroyed the Soviet economy and led to the collapse of the Union”.

A man uses a handheld device to scan a woman’s head for radiation during evacuation after the Chernobyl disaster.

In the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, civilians were screened for radioactive contamination as they were evacuated from affected areas: ordinary people subjected to unfamiliar technologies and urgent procedures, as authorities struggled to measure and contain an invisible and unprecedented threat. (Photo by Getty Images)

Chernobyl’s role in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war

You can catch a glimpse of the old Soviet command-and-control system by focusing on Maria Protsenko, former chief architect of Pripyat. She is someone whose testimony Higginbotham remembers especially vividly. A woman who had previously been planning Pripyat’s expansion, Protsenko was instead made responsible for mapping out the path of an electric fence to encircle the contaminated city. According to Midnight in Chernobyl, she believed assurances she might one day return to her family home there. It never happened – and never was going to happen.

Decades later, those holding power in Moscow again made their presence known in Chernobyl when Russian forces occupied the site in February 2022, in the first days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Troops even dug trenches in contaminated land before withdrawing a few weeks later. This came in the wake of a combat drone, likely Russian, hitting the New Safe Confinement, a structure built to cover reactor number four and the failing, hastily constructed sarcophagus. The damage the drone caused will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to repair, necessary if the structure is to contain potential radiation leaks. “The unfortunate truth is that Chernobyl is as central to world events as it was 40 years ago,” says Higginbotham.

Aerial view of the damaged Chernobyl nuclear power plant shortly after the 1986 explosion, with exposed structures and surrounding industrial buildings.

Taken in the immediate aftermath of the 26 April, 1986 explosion, this image shows the shattered core of the Chernobyl nuclear plant. With the reactor building torn open and emergency responses still unfolding, the incident marked the beginning of the worst civilian nuclear disaster in history. (Photo by Getty Images)

Nevertheless, Chernobyl will continue to attract visitors, some drawn by the idea that it’s a kind of Eden teeming with wildlife, evidence of how Mother Earth heals herself. This is a romantic view. Prior to the accident, says Higginbotham, the area was popular with hunters and fishermen. It may well be that wildlife, some of it badly affected by radiation, is more plentiful because of the lack of those hunters, than for any other reasons.

After all, nature’s recovery hasn’t been total.

“If you go into the middle of what’s called the Red Forest, you’ll be able to see for yourself exactly the degree to which nature is able to thrive in a radioactive environment,” he says.

“On the outside of the forest, the trees look normal. As you go further and further into the heart of the forest where the radioactive contamination was at its greatest after the accident, the trees grow sparser, more spindly and more peculiarly shaped. And in the end, in the centre of the Red Forest – where it’s most contaminated – there’s nothing except dead pine leaves, pine needles and tree trunks.”

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham is published by Corgi.

Authors

Jonathan Wright