Most of Chernobyl’s workforce and staff live in apartments and bungalows at Slavutich, a 40-minute train ride eastward across the exclusion zone, through a piece of Belarus and over the Dnieper River back into Ukraine.
The town of nearly 30,000 people was built in the wake of the accident to house families evacuated from the blighted terrain near the plant. Designed on Soviet lines, Slavutich has a vast empty main square and an eerily underused beltway wide enough for six lanes.