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Tourists have been going to Chernobyl, the site of the worst nuclear accident in history, for 20 years. In 2015 alone, about 25,000 people visited the site. Chernobyl Tour, one of the operators offering guided excursions, acknowledges that it cannot guarantee that a visit to the area is completely risk-free, but makes a credible case that unless one breaks the rules or is very, very unlucky, the typical exposure to radiation on the tours is well below danger levels. Pictured here, a tour bus parked at the border of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, its passengers waiting for clearance to enter.

Photos & Videos Europe Travel

A visit to Ukraine: Chernobyl

Tourists have been going to Chernobyl, the site of the worst nuclear accident in history, for 20 years. In 2015 alone, about 25,000 people visited the site. Chernobyl Tour, one of the operators offering guided excursions, acknowledges that it cannot guarantee that a visit to the area is completely risk-free, but makes a credible case that unless one breaks the rules or is very, very unlucky, the typical exposure to radiation on the tours is well below danger levels. Pictured here, a tour bus parked at the border of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, its passengers waiting for clearance to enter. Photo Credit: Arnie Weissmann

Tourists have been going to Chernobyl, the site of the worst nuclear accident in history, for 20 years. In 2015 alone, about 25,000 people visited the site. Chernobyl Tour, one of the operators offering guided excursions, acknowledges that it cannot guarantee that a visit to the area is completely risk-free, but makes a credible case that unless one breaks the rules or is very, very unlucky, the typical exposure to radiation on the tours is well below danger levels. Pictured here, a tour bus parked at the border of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, its passengers waiting for clearance to enter.

Dutch tourists don disposable coveralls at the border of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

A playground slide in the abandoned village of Zalissya.

This 200-year-old Eastern Orthodox Church in Chernobyl is still active, and serves a congregation of transient workers and about 100 residents who never left the area after the nuclear disaster.

These robotic machines were brought to remove debris from the area around Reactor #4, which exploded on April 26, 1986, but radioactivity from the reactor was too strong and rendered them useless. Today, they are still too radioactive to approach, and are fenced off for display.

A once-secret Soviet military radar installation, 500 feet high and half a mile wide, still stands near Chernobyl, its metal too radioactive to be salvaged.

A new sarcophagus, built to contain radioactivity for 100 years, is being built on rails and will slide over the current cement sarcophagus that covers Chernobyl Reactor #4. The effectiveness of the current covering is thought to be expiring this year.

A machine at the cafeteria for workers and tourists in the exclusion zone measures radiation to detect possible contamination prior to entering the serving area.

A cook at the Chernobyl canteen, ladling borscht to workers and tourists.

What was once a grand boulevard has narrowed to just a little more than the width of one car as vegetation moves in from both sides in the abandoned town of Pripyat, where 50,000 workers and their families lived near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

A swimming pool in Pripyat's main recreational center. According to a tour guide, the glass was removed in order to recycle the metal window frames.

Gas masks that were being stored in a Pripyat school lay strewn over the floor of the cafeteria, partially framed by a tubeless television.

School's out, forever. A Pripyat classroom, its educational material strewn about.

Bumper cars, never driven by children, lay rusting in Pripyat's amusement park, which was scheduled to open four days after the nuclear accident.

Pripyat's abandoned hotel.