HBO's miniseries "Chernobyl" aired May 6 and is now at the top of IMDb's list of top rated television shows. The city the show is based on is seeing a spike in visitors.
Visitors stand outside the New Safe Confinement structure over the old sarcophagus covering the damaged fourth reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, in Chernobyl, Ukraine June 2, 2019., tourists flew to the actual Chernobyl. Chernobylwel.com, another company leading trips to the site, has seen an increase in the hundreds since the series aired, according to its marketing manager Michal Krajcir.
"Anecdotally, we've seen people mentioning they're more interested in visiting than they have ever been before," said Liana Corwin, consumer travel expert at Hopper. It's important for travelers to remember that Chernobyl is the site of a devastating tragedy. Radiation of the nuclear accident killed 28 workers in the first four months after the event and gave 106 workers acute radiation sickness,. The commission also said two workers died from non-radiological causes and 200,000 received doses of between 1 and 100 rem, well above the U.S. citizen's average of about 0.6 rem.
While there's debate over whether it's appropriate to take images at the site, Ivanchuk of SoloEast is very against commercialization there. He said the selling of souvenirs with a radiation theme, which he has seen sold at the doorway of the exclusion site, is "immoral and disrespectful to those who survived the accident and who come to the zone every day either for business or for personal reasons, such as to visit relative graves or a house they had to leave.