“There’s no official tourism here,” said Tetyana, “But people want to see it. On a busy day, there can be as many as 1000 visitors to the exclusion zone. Most of them have seen Chernobyl Diaries or played the computer game Stalker.”

Don’t Ukrainians find that tasteless?

“No,” she said, “The Soviet authorities tried to hide what happened here. We want everyone to know how it affected Ukraine, and to stop it happening again. But there’s positive stories, too, of human determination.”

Our first stop told one of those stories. The “Monument to those who saved the World” is dedicated to the firemen who put out the initial fire, stopping the disaster from being even worse.

“They knew their suits wouldn’t protect them from radiation,” said Tetyana “but they knew there was no-one else. The next day they were flown to Moscow for treatment. Their bodies were so radioactive that their eyes had changed colour, and the hospital floors above and below them were evacuated. They were buried in lead caskets below two metres of concrete.”