The Chernobyl exclusion zone

1986–present · Event

A 30-kilometre circle drawn around the plant in the disaster's first week hardens into a permanent country-sized void: 350,000 people eventually resettled, villages buried, and a zone where wolves, lynx and returning forest now outnumber people. It remains the largest radioactive exclusion area on earth.

On these timelines: Chernobyl, Eastern Europe & the Balkans, Russia & the USSR, Master

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Around 1986

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