The “highly radioactive” control room at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s Reactor 4 at the center of the facility’s infamous 1986 catastrophe is open for tourists, so long as they wear a protective suit, helmet, and gloves while inside, CNN reported.

Chernobyl tour agencies confirmed to the network that the control room is now open for guided walkthroughs following Ukrainian President Volydymyr Zelensky’s July decision to proclaim the region an official tourist attraction (and perhaps not coincidentally, a surge of interest following the release of HBO’s wildly popular Chernobyl miniseries). Those who enter the unit must afterward submit to two radiology tests to measure exposure to contaminants.

As for what to expect, in 2011 the Guardian reported that the room had largely been stripped of its plastic instrumentation switches by “souvenir-hunters among the decommissioning staff,” though some things such as diagrams on the behavior of the reactor and aged wiring remained. (Presumably there is no graphite there.) The seriously damaged unit 4 reactor itself and its original sarcophagus has been covered in a 32,000-ton arch called the New Safe Confinement.

The 1986 incident resulted in 28 deaths from acute radiation syndrome and 15 deaths from child thyroid cancer. The full death toll remains the subject of dispute, with most estimates pegging the number of expected long-term cancer cases from the disaster in the tens of thousands.

https://gizmodo.com/chernobyls-infamous-reactor-4-control-room-is-now-open-1838828529