A small number of people still live inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, nearly four decades after the 1986 nuclear disaster. As of 2021, roughly 101 civilians called the zone home, down from a peak of around 2,000 in the years following the evacuation. Beyond these permanent residents, several hundred workers rotate through the zone on regular shifts to maintain the decommissioned nuclear plant and its massive containment structure.
The Self-Settlers Who Refused to Leave
When Soviet authorities evacuated more than 100,000 people from the area surrounding the Chernobyl reactor in 1986, not everyone stayed away. Within weeks and months, a trickle of former residents began walking back through the checkpoints, returning to the villages they had lived in for decades. Ukrainians call them the samosely, meaning “self-settlers.” At their peak, roughly 2,000 of them were scattered across small settlements inside the 30-kilometer exclusion zone.
By 2021, only 101 remained. They are mostly women, many of them widows, and most are elderly. They tend gardens, keep chickens, and draw water from wells in villages that otherwise sit empty. The Ukrainian government eventually stopped trying to force them out and instead tolerated their presence, though living in the zone remains technically illegal. Radiation exposure varies significantly from one settlement to another inside the zone, meaning some self-settlers have accumulated far higher doses than others over the years.
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine dealt another blow to this aging community. Russian forces captured the Chernobyl site in late February 2022 and occupied it for over a month, cutting off supply routes and disrupting the limited services that reached the self-settlers. Ukrainian forces re-entered the exclusion zone in early April 2022, but the occupation added fresh hardship to a population that was already shrinking year by year from natural causes. No new residents have moved in to replace those who have died.
Workers Who Keep the Site Running
The largest group of people regularly present in the exclusion zone are the workers who manage the decommissioned nuclear power plant. Even though the last reactor was shut down in 2000, the site requires constant monitoring. Spent nuclear fuel still needs to be safely stored, and the New Safe Confinement, a massive steel arch completed in 2016, must be maintained over the damaged Reactor 4. At any given time, roughly 100 to 300 staff members are on site, including nuclear engineers, maintenance crews, medical personnel, firefighters, and security guards from Ukraine’s National Guard.
These workers operate on rotation schedules, typically spending a set number of days inside the zone before swapping out with a fresh crew. During the Russian occupation in early 2022, that system broke down entirely. Around 300 people were trapped inside the plant for weeks. One shift worked continuously for about 600 hours, roughly 25 days straight, before a volunteer crew was finally allowed in to replace them. Fifty staff members and several National Guard soldiers were among the first group to rotate out on March 20, replaced by 46 volunteers.
Tourists Before and After the War
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, the exclusion zone had become a surprisingly popular tourist destination. Visitor numbers climbed steadily through the late 2010s, boosted by the 2019 HBO miniseries about the disaster. That year, more than 124,000 tourists visited the zone, up from about 46,000 just two years earlier. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, over 36,000 people made the trip, and the number rebounded to about 73,000 in 2021.
Tourism was suspended after the Russian capture of the site in February 2022. Some guided visits have resumed since Ukrainian forces retook the area, but the ongoing war has kept numbers well below pre-invasion levels. Tourists typically spend only a day inside the zone, passing through checkpoints and following designated routes through the ghost city of Pripyat and past the reactor building itself.
Wildlife Has Filled the Void
The most numerous inhabitants of the exclusion zone are not human. With most people gone for nearly 40 years, the 2,600-square-kilometer zone has become one of Europe’s largest unintentional wildlife preserves. Long-term census data show that populations of elk, roe deer, red deer, and wild boar inside the zone are comparable to those in uncontaminated nature reserves in the region. Wolves have done especially well: their numbers inside the zone are more than seven times higher than in surrounding protected areas.
Aerial surveys tracking wildlife from one to ten years after the accident showed steady increases in elk, roe deer, and wild boar populations during that period, and those numbers have held. The absence of farming, hunting, and development has mattered more for large mammals than the presence of radiation. This does not mean the animals are unaffected by contamination at the cellular level, but at the population level, removing humans from the landscape has been a net benefit for wildlife abundance.
What Daily Life Looks Like Inside the Zone
For the handful of self-settlers still living in the zone, daily life is quiet and isolated. Most are in their 70s, 80s, or older. They live without running water or centralized heating, relying on wood stoves, rain barrels, and the food they grow. Some settlements have electricity; others do not. Medical care, when available, comes from staff based at the Chernobyl plant or from occasional visits arranged by zone administrators.
For workers, life in the zone is more structured but still unusual. They live in dormitory-style housing near the plant, eat in communal facilities, and follow strict radiation monitoring protocols. Their time inside the zone is limited by dose regulations, and they undergo regular health screenings. The city of Slavutych, built after the disaster specifically to house plant workers, sits just outside the exclusion zone and serves as the main base for commuting staff.
The zone today is a strange overlap of abandonment and activity. Forests have swallowed entire villages. Pripyat’s apartment buildings are crumbling under decades of weather and vegetation. Yet the roads near the plant are maintained, security checkpoints are staffed, and monitoring equipment tracks radiation levels around the clock. A handful of elderly residents, a rotating crew of workers, and a recovering ecosystem share one of the most contaminated landscapes on Earth.