The World

Remembering Chernobyl

A quarter of a century after the world’s worst nuclear disaster, we revisit the place and the people lived and worked in the evacuation zone.

25 years after the world’s worst nuclear disaster, host Bruce Gellerman revisits a story he reported in 1996. He updates that report by looking at efforts to build a new safe confinement for the aging sarcophagus built to cover and contain the destroyed reactor. He also examines the state of the natural environment in the exclusion zone with author Mary Mycio, and hears from photojournalist Michael Forster Rothbart how communities near the reactor are living with radiation exposure.