Academic tours for European universities.

For students and faculty, the Zone is an open-air laboratory: radioecology, history, nuclear energy, memory. We lead them through the Zone as lecturers. The guides are liquidator and scientist Sergii Mirnyi and Kateryna Aslamova.

For several years in a row, ecology students from Wageningen University in the Netherlands came to us. When the pandemic made travel impossible, we recorded a video tour of the Zone for them, and Sergii Mirnyi gave an overview lecture at the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine.

Historians from the University of New Haven in the US studied the First and Second World Wars on the battlefields of Italy and Normandy. Thanks to Sergii Mirnyi's research, the Cold War was added to their course, and he taught the Chornobyl part himself. The group flew to Kyiv. The students saw the Duga radar at Chornobyl-2 - a monument of the Cold War - the ChNPP, the remains of the Kyiv Fortified Area and the museum on the site of the Liutizh bridgehead in Novi Petrivtsi.

Together with Purdue University in the US we developed a program for nuclear engineers: the ChNPP, the Zone, Slavutych and classes in Kyiv. We also hosted students from the European University Viadrina in Germany together with the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and a group gathered by the student union of the University of Helsinki.

What struck them all? The scale. The size of the plant and the Duga antenna. The scale of the liquidation work - from the sarcophagus to the New Safe Confinement. The force with which nature has recovered over the years. And the space of the Zone itself - vast and free.