Wearing a white cotton bodysuit, a helmet and a respirator to protect against radiation, tour guide Beata Jevsejeva walks briskly up the stairs to the reactor hall at the decommissioned Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP) in the Lithuanian town of Visaginas. It’s late November and sparks fly out of the ground as mechanics saw metal to remove a refueling machine, once used to top up uranium levels. Ten years ago, on Dec. 31 2009, the INPP’s final nuclear reactor was shut down shortly before midnight. By 2038 the entire plant will be dismantled.
The room will look familiar to anyone who’s watched the HBO Chernobyl series, which was filmed at the Ignalina power plant in August 2018. The hugely popular series, watched by over 8 million people, shows the catastrophic nuclear explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near the town of Pripyat in Ukraine in 1986, which killed some 40,000 people and contaminated the surrounding area. Since the series was released in May, tourism to Ignal..