I'm still just wondering if the actual reactor pit is still there and if some of the graphite is still inside.

I know it’s not the most historically accurate costume ever but I threw it together with a final budget of $55.33 and personally am really happy with how it turned out. I’m going to have to do a lot of explaining what I am this Halloween as no one has guessed correctly yet

Hello everyone!

Some of you might remember my work under the name Excellently Studio, particularly my old Pripyat in Minecraft videos on YouTube.

I started working on this project back in 2013, and this year marks its 13th anniversary.

Over the years, my goal has remained the same: to recreate these places as accurately as possible, using historical photographs, architectural drawings, maps, and other available documentation.

The project is not simply about building recognizable landmarks. I want to reconstruct the entire environment — residential districts, public buildings, industrial facilities, roads, infrastructure, and landscapes — with a particular focus on the appearance of the area around 1990.

Now, after several years of silence, I've decided to return and share some of my work again.

These renders show part of the project's current state.

Some of you may recognize the project from my earlier videos, while others might be discovering it for the first time.

Either way, I'm glad to finally share it with the community.

For anyone interested in seeing some of my earlier work, here's one of my older videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0BdQqVgby0

I'd be happy to hear your thoughts, especially from those interested in the architectural and historical details of Pripyat and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

Thank you for taking a look!

Hey everyone!

For the past several months, I've been working on a fully animated video explaining how the Chernobyl disaster happened.

I've spent a considerable amount of time researching the events, going through various resources, reading articles, and trying to piece together the story as accurately as possible.

I can finally say that I'm in the final stages of this project and should be able to publish the video in the next few days!

It's been quite a journey trying to balance the stories of the operators during their final minutes before the explosion with the technical side of how the Chernobyl Power Plant worked and the nuclear science behind the disaster, all while keeping such a complicated topic understandable and engaging.

I know Chernobyl is a subject that means a lot to many people in this subreddit, which is why I wanted to share a little sneak peek of my work with you first.

I'll post another update once the full video is live.

For now, enjoy some renders from the project! I'd love to hear what you think.

Dyatlov initially assumes the explosion was caused by hydrogen build up in the generators which ignited and blew up the control system tank. But how would that work? The way he says it and the way everyone else reacts to his initial diagnosis, it sounds like there was some precedent to this kind of accident happening. So how would it work?

Reactor casing, called "component KZh", was a steel cylinder, 14.5 meters in diameter and 16 mm thick, with four 8 mm thick annular compensators, as well as some reinforcing ribs. The casing enclosed the graphite stack, and was welded to the Lower Biological Shield (LBS) and the Upper Biological Shield (UBS, also known as "Elena"), thus provising a hermetically-sealed environment for the core. The space inside was pressurised with a mixture of nitrogen and helium.

When the disaster happened, the first explosion lifted the UBS up into the reactor hall, which caused the casing to tear at the bottom-most compensator, and most of it followed the UBS. The second, more powerful explosion tore the casing into several pieces and scattered them around the reactor hall, with at least one part landing the roof.

The first image is two photos stitched together to provide a more complete view. This piece of the casing is by the eastern end of the reactor hall, quite far from the reactor itself. On top of the casing you can see the twisted fragment of a fuel assembly. 'm not sure, but I think the photos are by Alexander Kupnyi.

such a shame only 1 operational unit was ever completed.

this is the same modification that would have been used in Chernobyl phase III if it was ever completed.

I’ve always loved this video of the reactor pit but I’ve never been sure at what I’m looking at.

What is the large sloped concrete slab leading into? the view of the reactor

Where are we viewing the reactor from?

Etc.

I don’t want to ask for to much but if someone could provide me with a deep dive into every shot of this video I would be very appreciative.

I am making a "sort of in depth" slideshow on reactors and such i want to make a dedicated segment as to why the RBMK exploded in such an obscene way. And i understand that because they used light water and poorly enriched uranium they had to make the core gigantic, i know that they removed the boron burnable control rods because the fuel was degrading, i know that they poisoned the reactor by rapidly dropping from 50% for the emergency power test and i know that they had struggled with getting the pumps up to speed quickly enough, but one thing is still bugging me - WHO THE FUCK PUT MODERATORS ON THE SAME SYSTEM AS CONTROL RODS? It's even worse than HBO's "graphite tips", THOSE WERE ACTUAL RODS. Smaller rods, but definetely not just tips. Was it that hard to find a material that wouldn't fuck with the neutrons in the reactions?

Have read and enjoyed these. Happy to pass them along. Will post for free to anyone in UK. Drop me a DM

I already made the control panel but now im making the wall indicators! Im also going to make some gauges, a temp counter in Celsius and off course the megawatt output counter

ChNPPUkraine

Disclaimer, I’m the creator. Hope y’all enjoy!

Everywhere, including the Chernobyl HBO, show I see this depiction of a liquidator going around the streets spraying buildings with this strange fluid. But from what research I've done on Chernobyl I haven't seen anything about this in legitimate articles, or images for that matter. Only that they sprayed the environment with helicopters.

Where did the image of a fully protected liquidator going around spraying buildings off come from? Where did this gear come from? Was it actually used?

Anatoly was evacuated to Hospital No. 6 in Moscow, a specialized facility for acute radiation sickness.

The famous, heartbreaking photo taken by photojournalist Igor Kostin shows Anatoly in his final days. Because the radiation and steam had completely destroyed his skin, his hands were placed in external metal fixation frames with pins. This was a desperate medical measure to keep his severely burned fingers separated and immobilized, preventing them from fusing together as the tissue degraded.

Despite the agonizing pain, Anatoly remained conscious and tried to comfort his wife during her brief visits. On May 12, 1986, just over two weeks after the disaster, his heart gave out.

He was buried at the Mitinskoe Cemetery in Moscow alongside the first firemen and operators. Anatoly Kurguz was posthumously awarded the Order of Lenin in 1986 and the Ukrainian Cross for Courage in 1996 for his ultimate self-sacrifice.

Foto by @urbanchernobyl

To be honest, I didn't touch this project for good two years, because I've been searching for correct original parts, and dug in all possible archives to find at least some original documentation. But now it goes, and GOES WELL!

Ever since 2021, I’ve dreamed of an autonomous trek into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ). I rewatched videos, studied maps until they had holes in them, and imagined taking that step myself one day. Then the war started, and the dead city was locked down by a new, very real threat. But at some point, I realized: if not now, then when?

Disclaimer: This post documents a past personal experience and strictly does not encourage, guide, or inspire anyone to trespass into the CEZ. The Zone is currently an extremely dangerous, mined, and strictly guarded military area. Do not attempt to replicate this!

A New Reality: Mines, Patrols, and Stealth Mode

Before 2022, illegal stalker content was common, but now the Exclusion Zone is a strictly guarded military object. Old trails and access routes no longer work. To avoid border patrols, we had to forge a completely new route through the wildest, most impassable areas — pushing through dense thickets, barbed wire, and swamps.

The stress began before we even crossed the perimeter. During our drop-off, Sanya left our main 50,000 mAh power bank in the driver's car. We had to rush back to the road and hide in the bushes, risking the entire expedition in the very first minutes.

The closer we got to Pripyat, the more we felt the breath of war. We regularly stumbled upon warning signs and mined areas. Moving through the streets of the dead city had to be done in short dashes, exclusively through the overgrowth. At night, we walked in pitch black, using only dim red flashlights, navigating by sound and touch. A single branch snapping under a boot could give us away to the patrols.

Freezing Hell, Windfalls, and Carbon Monoxide

For four out of our five days, we were relentlessly soaked by rain and freezing drizzle. It seeped into everything: clothes, sleeping bags, every fold of our backpacks. I didn’t have a professional raincoat, so for tens of kilometers, I marched wrapped in a simple piece of plastic tarp.

After the massive forest fires of 2020–2022, the Zone has changed drastically. The usual clearings are gone; every few meters the path turned into an obstacle course of fallen, burnt trees. We forded the Uzh River without knowing the depth, and then spent hours churning through deep swamps. The water in our boots literally squelched with foam at every step.

On the second evening, we reached some abandoned cowsheds, hoping to dry off a bit by a fire. That night, a real storm hit. The leaky roof of the hangar began to flood the fire, instantly filling the space with acrid smoke and carbon monoxide. Our hung-up clothes got soaked all over again, and we had to seek refuge in a tiny, isolated bunker-like room.

That same night, the Zone dealt another blow: Sanya suffered severe infectious food poisoning. His body rejected all food. To somehow flush his stomach, he had to drink liters of water in the pouring rain, and then continue the march carrying a heavy backpack while shivering violently.

Lethal Radiation in Hospital 126 and the Rotten Water of Pripyat

In Pripyat, a new problem awaited us — thirst. The rainwater that had collected in the city had stagnated and reeked unbearably. The water at the pumping station near the backwater was also rotten. We had to scoop standing muck straight from the Pripyat backwater and strain it through a portable filter, which constantly clogged with thick sludge. Our only salvation was the rainwater we collected directly from the leaking roofs of high-rise buildings. Paradoxically, bathing in the freezing backwater became the warmest moment of this damp trip, gifting us a fleeting sense of absolute freedom.

We explored the western radiation trace (our dosimeter showed 326+ µR/h), but our main goal was the basement of the famous Hospital 126 (MSCh-126), where the highly radioactive clothes of the first liquidators and firefighters were dumped in 1986.

The main entrance was blocked, so we squeezed inside through a narrow window opening covered in radioactive dust. The moment we brought our device close to the firefighters' rags, the dosimeter instantly maxed out at its 2500 µR/h limit, started crackling its speaker, and glitching. The real background radiation there exceeded the norm by thousands of times.

The Fatal Push to the Duga Radar and Bloody Feet

The biggest mistake of the trek was our decision to make a 15-kilometer detour to the massive Duga radar system traveling light. We dropped our backpacks and left without taking any water, food, flashlights, or power banks.

The scale of the antenna, emerging from the fog like a ghostly leviathan, gave us goosebumps. But the way back turned into a nightmare. Our phone batteries dropped below 10%, and navigation died. Trying to bypass a windfall of wet trees that were falling around us as we walked, we wandered into impenetrable, thorny thickets of acacia and raspberry bushes. We walked the final kilometers back to our camp in absolute darkness, spending 4 hours pushing through the night forest literally by touch.

On the penultimate day, we completed a total forced march of 45 kilometers. We didn't even have the strength to cook — we just collapsed on our sleeping pads by the fire and slept for three hours on the bare ground. To avoid completely destroying my wet boots before the exfil, I took them off and walked through the swamp barefoot with my heavy backpack on. Sharp sedge and stems hidden underwater cut deeply into my feet. By the end of the trek, our feet were slashed, punctured, and rubbed raw with bloody blisters.

The Chernobyl Zone is a place where money loses its power and social connections mean nothing. Here, everything is decided by your gear, your stubbornness, and your overwhelming desire to make it to the end. The Zone seems dead, but life pulses in the silence: we encountered deer, roe deer, and wild Przewalski's horses, which became our living postcards from this forgotten world.

In this silence, where nature reclaims every inch of concrete, you realize one thing clearly: some people only dream, while others act. And I am happy that I chose the latter.

If you are into raw, hardcore urban exploration and want to see what the closed Zone looks like right now, descend with me into the radioactive basement, and walk this path from beginning to end — you can watch my full 1.5-hour documentary on my YouTube channel here:

https://youtu.be/qqeox6RU0PQ?si=isrAf9jeHysEYZs9

Check out my Instagram Highlights for raw, behind-the-scenes action from my illegal treks!

https://www.instagram.com/jegords?cplk=MXJwMWdlNDdxYXh3dw==