Amazing! I thought this looked familiar and after a bit of searching I found that photos of Kolmanskop were used in cover art for a Tame Impala album, which is why I thought this looked familiar.
I remember reading a while ago that Chernobyl has become a flourishing nature preserve. While animals have a health risk from radiation, it's still a smaller health hazard than living near human settlements. It's sad that our civilization is more destructive than an open nuclear core.
If you are interested in this, you have to see a youtube video of an adventurous guy with a channel called Shiey, backpacking to the region and staying overnight. Such an incredible journey.
You can clearly see plants growing out of the concrete, based on the videos that exists of Pripyat from before the disaster that is not what it looked like.
Pripyat was a privileged town where people lived well.
The "after" is also fairly old - at least before the new safe confinement was built. Here's what it looked like around 6 years ago: https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/87f8b08f-4149-47a0-886c-faa199d7ea36.jpeg (Apologies for the quality, on mobile and had to shrink it to get it to upload)
!workersandresources is just like that without the radiation (well, there are NPPs and radiation can affect public health, but it's not Tschernobyl: The Game and more Pripjat: 1960-1986)
He's a Lithuanian YouTuber and thrill-seeker who illegally went there and had to run from security at one point, too. He found lots of signs of other "Stalkers," including a group in the flesh that invited him for dinner.
While the background radiation levels aren't exceptionally dangerous and people do live in the exclusion zone, there are a large number of radioactive hotspots that could be extremely dangerous. They're small pieces of the reactor core that were spread around by the explosion, and they're extremely radioactive still. If you inhaled one or if you were to eat a plant or animal that had eaten/absorbed one it could do a significant amount of damage to you. Kyle Hill has some really good videos on this topic.
Reclaimed By Nature
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