"The amount he was asking for - fifty thousand Ukrainian hryvnias, or 10,000 US dollars..."
The hryvnia, sometimes hryvnya or grivna (Ukrainian: гривня, pronounced [ˈɦrɪu̯ɲɑ], abbr.: грн (hrn in Latin alphabet)); sign: ₴, code: (UAH), has been the national currency of Ukraine since September 2, 1996. The hryvnia is subdivided into 100 kopiyok. In medieval times, it was a currency of Kievan Rus'.
"You know about Pripyat, yes?"
Prypiat is a ghost town near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, part of Kiev Oblast (province) of northern Ukraine, near the border with Belarus.
The city has a special status within the Kiev Oblast, being the city of oblast-level subordination, although it is located within the limits of Ivankiv Raion. The city also is being supervised by the Ministry of Emergencies of Ukraine as part of the Zone of Alienation jurisdiction.
Pripyat was founded in 1970 to house workers for the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It was officially proclaimed a city in 1979 but was abandoned in 1986 following the Chernobyl disaster. It was the ninth nuclear city (Russian: атомоград atomograd) in the Soviet Union at the time and its population was around 50,000 before the accident[.
The annual rate of natural increase for the city's population was estimated at around 800 persons, plus over 500 newcomers from all corners of the Soviet Union each year; Pripyat's population had been expected to rise to 78,000. The Yanov railroad station (part of Chernigov-Ovruch railroad link) was less than 1 km away from the city, and the navigable Pripyat River flows nearby.
Post Chernobyl Years
In 1986 the city of Slavutich was constructed to replace Pripyat. After the city of Chernobyl, this is the second-largest city for accommodating power plant workers and scientists in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
Many of the building interiors in Pripyat have been vandalised and ransacked over the years. Because the buildings have not been maintained since 1986, the roofs leak, and in the springtime the rooms are flooded with water. Trees can be seen growing on roofs and even inside the buildings. All this adds to the deterioration process; a four-story school collapsed in July 2005.
One notable landmark often featured in photographs of the city, video games (such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series) and visible from aerial-imaging websites such as Google Maps, is the long-abandoned ferris wheel located in the Pripyat amusement park.
Safety"The town near Chernobyl."
A natural concern is whether it is safe to visit Prypiat and the surroundings. The Zone of Alienation is considered relatively safe to visit, and several Ukrainian companies offer guided tours around the area. The radiation levels have dropped considerably, compared to the fatal levels of April 1986, due to the decay of the short-lived isotopes released during the accident. In most places within the city, the level of radiation does not exceed an equivalent dose of 1 μSv (one microsievert) per hour.
The city and the Zone of Alienation are now bordered with guards and police, but obtaining the necessary documents to enter the zone is not considered particularly difficult. In 2005, New York-based entrepreneur David C. Haines founded a company to provide guided tours of the city. A guide accompanies visitors to ensure nothing is vandalised or taken from the zone.
The doors of most of the buildings are held open to reduce the risk to visitors, and almost all of them can be visited when accompanied by a guide. The city of Chernobyl, a few kilometers south from Pripyat, has some accommodation including a hotel, many apartment buildings, and a local lodge, which are maintained as a permanent residence for watch-standing crew and tourists
The Chernobyl disaster was a catastrophic nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine (then officially Ukrainian SSR), which was under the direct jurisdiction of the central authorities of the Soviet Union. An explosion and fire released large quantities of radioactive contamination into the atmosphere, which spread over much of Western USSR and Europe. It is widely considered to have been the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, and is one of only two classified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale (the other being the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011). The battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles.
No comments:
Post a Comment