'' Social mobility is as stagnant as the
Pripyat River after Chernobyl
Roaming concrete streets overtaken by forest, were a pack of wolves (seen by a visiting photographic crew), a small herd of Przewalski's horses released in the area in 1998 and giant catfish prospering in the fishing-free waters of the
Pripyat River. Radiation-resistant soybeans growing in experimental laboratories and mutated barn swallows suggested few definitive answers, but much to be pondered.
26, 1986, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a squat, gray concrete and metal complex on the banks of Ukraine's
Pripyat River, suffered the worst nuclear disaster the world has ever seen.
Anomalously high radioactivity levels were measured in groundwater not far from the
Pripyat River that scientists could not explain.
Drainage of the extensive marshlands around the
Pripyat river in Belarus during the post-war Soviet period, for example, was not a great success.
But reading the news of Chernobyl's latest reprieve on a gray morning at my home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, I recalled a deceptively golden afternoon in northern Ukraine last summer as I leaned on a bridge over the
Pripyat River, eight miles downstream from the Chernobyl nuclear power station.
If the Number Two Reactor at Three Mile Island can be thought of as a commode, the Unit Four Reactor at Chernobyl will forever in my mind be "the nuclear volcano" described in Grigori Medvedev's horrifying, bitter, and passionate book about the colossal disaster that occurred on April 26, 1986, on the banks of the
Pripyat River in the Soviet Ukraine.