Time for some Chernobyl... stuff (I won't say facts cos I don't how much if any of this actually true) we got told on a trip of the Exclusion Zone a few years back that doesn't make it into the usual Western narratives around the disaster - https://twitter.com/AtomicAnalyst/status/1386445849408929795

'Chernobyl' (or more accurately 'Chornobyl') is the Ukrainian name for the wormwood plant. Wormwood is also the usual translation for the name of a star in the Book of Revelation that will fall from heaven and poison the water when the End of the World kicks off

The Belarusian side of the Exclusion Zone should be much much bigger, but it encompasses a huge portion of the nation's farmland and the people in charge after the Soviet Union fell decided that wasn't workable for them

Adults that were evacuated from Pripyat and the Chernobyl area as children back in 1986 are routinely denied marriage licenses so as to prevent them from having children who may be genetically affected by their parents' exposure back in the day

(About 80% of Ukrainians identify as Orthodox Christians, so although everyone is free to have as many children as they want out of wedlock, this is - as in any even vaguely religious society - somewhat frowned upon)

Part of the Duga radar array, a massive (and I mean *massive*) system designed to detect enemy ICBMs entering the atmosphere is about 2 miles away from the Chernobyl power plant. The plant may even have been built in Chernobyl at least in part to power it

The disaster knocked out the power to the Duga array, leading to some speculation that the disaster was engineered by... someone precisely for this reason

In addition, Pripyat, which was completely evacuated in the wake of the disaster, was home to a number of factories making components for the guidance systems of the Soviets' own ICBM's

Our guide told us the Americans thought the Duga array was a long-range Soviet microwave weapon, used to control people's moods and behaviour. Ridiculous!

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the team who'd built it were scooped up by the Americans, who put them to work building HAARP in Alaska.

And HAARP, said our guide, absolutely is a long range microwave weapon used to control people's moods and behaviour

The Duga array is still there, extremely rusty and not at all maintained by the Ukrainian military presence in the exclusion zone. 35 years since the disaster, almost all the radioactive elements left in the exclusion zone are in the ground rather than the air...

...so you can imagine what a huge, and potentially hugely dangerous, headache demolishing this structure might prove to be.

Apparently the Chinese government offered to dismantle it using helicopters, but Ukraine didn't want to give them 1000s of tons of scrap steel for free

(once again, I dunno how much of this is true, it's just what we got told)

On weekdays, it's 90%+ tourists on the tours round the Exclusion Zone. On weekends it's 90%+ Ukrainians. Lovely day out with the fam, like going to Beamish or something