It's now been exactly 35 years since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster wreaked havoc on the community near Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR, but even three decades on, the effects continue to linger to this day - as an urban explorer found when he stumbled upon a bag that had nearly 200 times more radiation than a CT scan:
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YouTuber Neil Ansell, whose channel is called Abandoned Explorer, took a trip to the nuclear zone near Pripyat a couple of years ago, and found some discarded items that he decided to run 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 15 mSv.
The threshold for relocating people from Chernobyl was just 350 mSv.
To add some extra context/horrifying reality a single dose of radiation of 5,000 mSv would cause half the people exposed to it die within a month.
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Neil said: "I was stunned just how radioactive some of the items were.
"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.
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"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 on 26 April 1986 is thought to have killed thousands of people - although the official figure released by the Soviet Union was just 31. It also left a 2,600km exclusion zone.
Despite this, or most likely because of it, the area has become a bit of an unlikely hit with tourists.
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A number of companies now offer holidays to the area, with one company claiming that 75,000 people went to the area in 2018. Nearly 200,000 tourists visited in 2019 - although obviously numbers will have dropped in the years that followed due to the pandemic, which hindered travel significantly.
Martin Duben, one of the people behind CHERNOBYLwel.come, told LADbible in 2019: "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.
"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: CatersTopics: World News, News, Chernobyl