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Urban Explorer Heads To Chernobyl And Finds Bag With 200 Times More Radiation Than CT Scan

Urban Explorer Heads To Chernobyl And Finds Bag With 200 Times More Radiation Than CT Scan

He took a Geiger counter into the area

Claire Reid

Claire Reid

An urban explorer who visited to the Chernobyl site found a bag that had nearly 200 times more radiation than a CT scan. I mean, I'm not sure what he was expecting to find within the exclusion zone, but there we are.

Neil Ansell took a trip to the nuclear zone near to Pripyat in Ukraine, when he found some discarded items which he ran a Geiger counter over.

The device recorded radiation levels as high as 2,728 millisieverts (mSv), which is almost 200 times as high as an adult CT scan which hits 15mSv.

The threshold for relocating people from Chernobyl was just 350mSv.

To add some extra context/horrifying reality a single dose of radiation of 5,000mSv would cause half the people exposed to it die within a month.

Neil said: "I was stunned just how radioactive some of the items were.

Neil Ansell took a trip to the nuclear zone near to Pripyat in Ukraine.
Caters News and Media

"Fortunately, we didn't open the bag and weren't exposed to it for long enough.

"We're still not sure what exactly was in the bag, even our tour guide didn't know.

"I wasn't interested in trying to find out either as if we'd touched or inhaled it, it could have been fatally dangerous.

"I felt really emotional after leaving Chernobyl as it has become a ghost town where it was once a lively town."

The explosion of Reactor Four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986, is thought to have killed thousands of people - although the official figure released by the Soviet Union was just 31 - and left a 2,600km exclusion zone.

The Geiger counter hit 2,728 millisieverts (mSv).
Caters News and Media

Despite this, or possibly because of it, the area has become a bit of an unlikely hit with tourists. A number of tourist companies offer holidays to the area, with one company claiming that 75,000 people went to the area last year, and around 100,000 are expected to visit across 2019.

Martin Duben, one of the people behind CHERNOBYLwel.come, told LADbible: "It depends what time of the year you go, the spring and autumn are crowded - months April, May, September and October there are thousands of visitors per weekend.

Inside the exclusion zone of the 1986 disaster.
Caters News and Media

"The ghost town of Pripyat is not a ghost town at all, you have a hard time trying to take a picture where there is no-one there. There's too many tourists."

Featured Image Credit: Caters News and Media

Topics: World News, Interesting, Chernobyl