This site is based on materials generously provided by Igor Kabachenko, former dosimetrist of the Object Shelter, and courageous liquidator of the Chernobyl Disaster. The site is built around so-called 'cartograms' depicting radiation levels in various rooms of the 'sarcophagus', in addition to photos, linked videos and damage assessments from a scholarly publication. The materials were originally prepared for a website in the early 2000s. The site was largely complete when work was halted due to lack of financing, although many cartograms are still missing. My primary contribution to the current version is in taking low-resolution floorplans of thirteen different 'otmetki' (heights AGL in meters) of the Object Shelter and painstakingly tracing them into vector drawings.

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Some things to bear in mind:

• Adding translations and additional photos will remain an ongoing effort. Frequently-repeated labels on cartograms (e.g., names of dosimetrists, dose rate units) will likely remain untranslated, since attentive readers should be able to recognize them (if not read them).

• Room labels may contain errors, especially in the 'room purpose' tables.

• The retraced drawings are as faithful as possible to the originals, even with the original files have obvious errors. In particular, the lower levels have considerable offsets where staircases spill out of the stairwells, etc.

• Radiation levels are given in milliRoentgen (mP/ч) and Roentgen (P/ч) per hour and date from around the year 2000. Some rooms also have data for alpha and beta contamination in counts per minute.

  • Note: 1 mR is approximately 10 uSv, meaning that one hour at 1 mR/hr will result in as much radiation exposure as the average person receives in a day. Nuclear plant workers will exceed their yearly dose allowance if the average dose rate is over 0.8 mR/hr.

  • 1 R is approximately 10 mSv, meaning that the yearly dose allowance will be exceeded in 5 hours. 10 hours of exposure is expected to have a small but measurable increase in cancer risk. 100 R is the threshold for acute radiation sickness.

  • However, internal exposure via inhalation of beta and alpha emitters is generally more dangerous. Beta and alpha contamination is measured in counts per minute per square centimeter, not in Roentgens.

• See here for my work fact-checking the HBO miniseries. Feel free to send questions or feedback to mikhailjlong@gmail.com.