It's really distressing seeing the number of fake videos/information on YouTube and the internet.

Just today, I was recommended an AI-generated short of the disaster, with a building exploding with a massive blast like a volcano, wrong information, dates, and spellings, and AI-generated pictures of the 'survivors' with three arms, two heads, and so on. The less told about that the better. It's really disheartening to see how people are misusing this incident to get views and followers, and how many people have formed wrong opinions about Chornobyl just by consuming these kinds of content.

I'm an avid science and history lover, and I've read a lot about Chornobyl, Fukushima, Three-Mile Island, etc. It literally burns me up inside when I hear people say things like 'all animals in Chornobyl now glow and have eight legs', 'the explosion was an atom bomb', etc. Even worse are the people who, after consuming these kinds of content and learning wrong information and forming wrong opinions, assume that nuclear power is unsafe and should be banned, and if not, the whole world would explode one day.

Chornobyl wasn't an atomic bomb. It was a steam explosion, directly and indirectly caused by many things: the undertraining of staff, spread of misinformation in the USSR, poor design of the reactor, and many more reasons. Pripyat isn't a nuclear wasteland. It's a beautiful place, just frozen in time from the 1980s. Seeing a picture of the quiet buildings and streets, the old cars, schools, and other objects from the lives of 50,000 people who were living there speaks volumes about how a marvellous dream city like this can be affected by lies and misinformation. It's a different world to the smog-filled, crowded, and noisy cities that most of us live in today. It was a model community for the Soviet Union.

One day, I want to, and I will visit the Exclusion Zone and Pripyat, just to observe the atmosphere, the feeling of life in a different era, and the spectacle of nature reclaiming its territory from humans. One day, I hope for the record about disasters like these being set straight, and hope to live in a world where people and nature coexist, knowledge is valued, and fake news doesn't exist. Until then, I want to hold on to the lessons taught by Chornobyl, gain more knowledge about the world, and use this knowledge to improve it.

Sorry if the thoughts are jumbled. I just wanted to pen down my thoughts while they are fresh in my mind.

Slava Ukraini.