Chernobyl, Ukraine: the nuclear option holiday

Thirty years after reporting the nuclear meltdown, Kim Willsher returns to consider the new 'disaster tourism'

Standing 100 yards from the husk of Chernobyl's Reactor Number 4, the click-click-click of the Geiger counter becomes alarmingly insistent. One step closer and it is beeping and flashing. Our guide gives a reassuring smile. "It's fine," she says. But she knows we know she would say that.

Soon, we are back on the bus and driving away from the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Power Station, better known as Chernobyl. When I first visited, two years after the world's worst nuclear accident, it took weeks of negotiating with the Soviet authorities to gain access to the plant. Today, busloads of visitors arrive on an almost daily basis. For less than 100, the adventurous can take a one-day tour of the so-called "dead zone", the contaminated 10km circle drawn around Chernobyl after the accident in the early hours of 26 April 1986.