GHOST TOWN
Eerie Chernobyl drone footage shows abandoned apartment blocks and funfairs in city crippled by nuclear plant explosion
EERIE images from the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster have been captured in incredible drone footage, panning the now abandoned city synonymous with Chernobyl.
All that remains since the 1986 catastrophic accident - which saw plumes of radioactive material decimate towns and animals nearby - is a haunting ghost town.
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Urban explorer and Youtuber '' returned to the northern Ukrainian city of Pripyat to traverse the infamous 1,000 square mile contaminated disaster region.
From the safety of a drone, he captured the bleak desolation of abandoned buildings, homes and theme park rides set again a striking forest backdrop.
The images are worlds away from the once thriving Soviet city on the Ukrainian-Belarus border.
An accident in the early hours of the morning of April 26 led to a sudden and unexpected power surge and a series of explosions which released 400 times more radiation into the atmosphere than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
More than 100,000 people were forced to flee their homes.
The blast was the equivalent of 500 nuclear bombs.
The toxic aftermath is thought to have killed or shortened the lives of as many as 980,000 people.
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The final death toll caused by the disaster is unknown, and widely disputed, with United Nations figures claiming 4,000 people have died as a result of the accident at most.
However, according to the , Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine, has claimed: "At least 500,000 people - perhaps more - have already died out of the two million people who were officially classed as victims of Chernobyl in Ukraine.
"34,499 people who took part in the clean-up of Chernobyl have died in the years since the catastrophe. "The deaths of these people from cancers was nearly three times as high as in the rest of the population.
"We have found that infant mortality increased 20% to 30% because of chronic exposure to radiation after the accident."
There's no denying the horrifying impact the radiation had on the people living in Pripyat - the city founded in 1970 to serve the Chernobyl power plant.
The areas surrounding the power plant - 350,000 people - weren't evacuated until 36 hours after the explosion, and in the period since some five million people have been exposed to radiation, living on contaminated land in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
The nuclear nightmare will be recreated in five-part dramatisation called Chernobyl, which is a co-production between Sky Orginal and HBO.
It has been billed as telling the untold story of the lives of the people who saw it first hand.
WHAT WAS THE CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR DISASTER?
POWER PLANT MELTDOWN
An alarm bellowed out at the nuclear plant on April 26, 1986, as workers looked on in horror at the control panels signalling a major meltdown in the number four reactor.
The safety switches had been switched off in the early hours to test the turbine but the reactor overheated and generated a blast the equivalent of 500 nuclear bombs.
The reactor's roof was blown off and a plume of radioactive material was blasted into the atmosphere.
As air was sucked into the shattered reactor, it ignited flammable carbon monoxide gas causing a fire which burned for nine days.
The catastrophe released at least 100 times more radiation than the atom bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
EVACUATION
Soviet authorities waited 24 hours before evacuating the nearby town of Pripyat - giving the 50,000 residents just three hours to leave their homes.
After the accident traces of radioactive deposits were found in Belarus where poisonous rain damaged plants and caused animal mutations.
But the devastating impact was also felt in Scandinavia, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, France and the UK.
An 18-mile radius known as the “Exclusion Zone” was set up around the reactor following the disaster.
DEATH TOLL
At least 31 people died in the accident - including two who were killed at the scene and more who passed away a few months later from Acute Radiation Syndrome.
The actual death toll is hard to predict as mortality rates have been hidden by propaganda and reports were lost when the Soviet Union broke up.
In 2005, the World Health Organisation revealed a total of 4,000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure.
About 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer have been seen since the disaster - mainly in people who were children or teenagers at the time.
MUTATIONS
Farmers noticed an increase in genetic abnormalities in farm animals immediately after the disaster.
This spiked again in 1990 when around 400 deformed animals were born - possibly as a result of radiation released from the sarcophagus intended to isolate the nuclear core.
Some animals were born with extra limbs, abnormal colouring and a smaller size.
Animals that remained in the exclusion zone became radioactive - including as many as 400 wolves, which is the highest density wolf population on the entire planet.
The Eurasian lynx - once believed to have disappeared from Europe - thrived in Chernobyl as there were no humans to run them out.
Birds were also affected by radiation, with barn swallows having deformed beaks, albinism and even smaller brains.
The radioactive animals all live in the "Red Forest", which got its name after the trees turned crimson in the fallout.
CHERNOBYL NOW
The site and Pripyat has been safe for tourists to visit since 2010.
There are around 160 villages in the Exclusion Zone.
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Aerial footage of the enormous abandoned Duga radar antenna hidden in forests near Chernobyl
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