Haunting Chernobyl photos show lights still glowing on nuclear control – World News – News

New photographs from inside the abandoned Chornobyl nuclear power plant have surfaced ahead of the 40th anniversary of the 1986 disaster, showing rooms left in a state that looks eerily unchanged, including a control panel that’s still lit.

The images, distributed by Instar and published by the New York Post, show dust-coated desks with papers still scattered across them, as if staff had only just fled. Another shot focuses on equipment in the control room, near a notice referencing “fire safety conditions,” with reports describing an unsettling hum inside the building.

The pictures have been released as Ukraine prepares to mark 40 years since the blast at 1:23 am on April 26, 1986 — the moment a reactor exploded near Pripyat, then part of the Soviet Union, unleashing radiation across large parts of Europe, forcing mass evacuations, and leaving long-term environmental damage.

This week, a group of people who lived through the aftermath, including former firefighters, medics, and plant workers, returned to the site for a media showcase.

Volodymyr Vechirko, 62, who previously worked at Chornobyl as a cleaner, said it was painful to see the contrast between the thriving facility it once was and what remains. He described being back at the plant as emotionally overwhelming.

While the anniversary inevitably draws attention back to the Soviet-era catastrophe, Ukraine says Chornobyl is again in the shadow of danger because of the war.

Ukrainian officials have blamed a second, separate incident at the site on a Russian drone strike with an explosive warhead in the early hours of February 14, 2025. While the damage is not comparable to the scale of 1986, it reignited fears about the risks posed by military action around nuclear facilities.

The original disaster began in a city built for plant workers and their families. Many residents in Pripyat did not immediately grasp the scale of what had happened, and Soviet authorities failed to quickly disclose the full extent of the threat.

Evacuations from the radiation-filled city of Pripyat started about a day later, with people taken out by bus, many believing they would soon return. The Soviet Union directed most of those fleeing Pripyat to Kyiv, spreading more radioactive material. Then, days later, the state decided to go ahead with a May Day (a worker’s day holiday) parade, drawing thousands outdoors just miles from the worst nuclear disaster in history.

Fallout from the explosion traveled far beyond Ukraine. The article’s account also describes Soviet efforts to stop radioactive clouds moving towards Moscow, alleging that aircraft seeded clouds over Belarus with silver iodide to trigger rain and bring contaminated particles down there instead. Belarus ultimately received a significant share of the radioactive fallout, with some residents later describing “black rain.”

In the decades that followed, the destroyed reactor was entombed to contain the radioactive material left behind, and an exclusion zone was established, remaining largely uninhabitable due to long-lived contaminants such as cesium-137 and strontium-90. Over time, parts of the zone were seen as stable enough for limited work — and even tourism — until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine shifted the security landscape.

Russian forces moved into the Chornobyl exclusion zone in the early stages of the 2022 invasion after crossing from Belarus, and the site has remained a point of concern because of the radioactive waste and the huge structures designed to keep it contained.

Those concerns intensified again after the reported 2025 strike. The UN’s nuclear watchdog said the large protective structure over the reactor could no longer be used.