It was one of the worst nuclear disasters in history. Now 27 years on, the desolate wasteland of Chernobyl still has an eerie atmosphere, according to a man from the New South Wales central west who has just returned from the exclusion zone.

On April 26th 1986, the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl in the Ukraine exploded in an event that had catastrophic impacts.

Rob Napier from Orange has just returned from a trip inside the nuclear exclusion zone.

"I'm one of these retirees that just won't lie down.

"I'm interested in environmental issues around the world and what we can learn from them, and often you've got to go to extreme places to really get some messages about where we need to go from here," Napier says.

Napier says the explosion and consequent devastation, evacuation and deaths could have been avoided.

"It was really an unnecessary experiment.

"What they were doing was seeing that if they lost the power through an attack from outside, whether the power plant could respond quickly enough on emergency power.

"They lost control of that process through a series of errors."

After the explosion a plume of radioactive material spread across much of Western Europe.

"It's a hidden enemy; you can't see it and you don't know what the effects are. It's been very hard to really pin-point the direct effects," Napier says.

Because the exclusion zone around the reactor is still heavily patrolled, only people on registered tours are allowed inside.

"We then went to the old town of Chernobyl and some of the old people have come back.

"It's very eerie with lots of houses abandoned.

"A lot of the old people didn't want to leave and you're not allowed in if you're under-18," he says.

At the height of the emergency, 43, 000 people were evacuated from the town of Pripyat near the reactor, in three hours using 1, 000 buses.

Napier says the devastation was astonishing.

"They've bulldozed most of the village buildings and buried a lot of them to get rid of the contamination.

"We went to an abandoned kindergarten which was very eerie and very sad.

"Everything was left there like in an apocalypse."

With the original 'concrete tomb' around the destroyed reactor beginning to erode, a new 20, 000 tonne concrete dome is being built to shroud the reactor.

Napier says Australia needs to learn and prepare for a devastating event.

"The people of that area have great difficulty exporting food, and their whole image.

"We need to guard our image and try to avoid those sorts of problems," he says.

"We need to do the what-ifs and prepare ourselves strategically for things that can happen, whether it is a food scare or something else.

"We need to think 'what do we do to prepare ourselves if certain things happen?'.

"There will be problems, we can guarantee those, but we need to be prepared."