Thank you for downloading from the BBC.

The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. We just drove past some of the deserted houses. This is the first time I see what used to be a buzzing

lived in area. Skeletons of the houses as there were inside.

We are on the road from Kyiv to Chernobyl, a journey of about a hundred miles that I used to take regularly when my parents worked on

the construction of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the early 1980s. We lived

in what was to me the beautiful town of Pripe, barely a kilometer from the station.

My name is Allah Olben, although back then it was Allahravchuk, and I was a teenager with dreams of becoming an opera singer.

By the time of the Chernobyl disaster, I was at Music College in Kiev, and my parents had moved away from Pripet to Rivna, another nuclear station further west.

My parents returned to work at Chernobyl after the accident.

But this is the first time I've been back.

Chernobyl continues to be the biggest...

I'm traveling with Vince Novak, Director of the Nuclear Safety Department for the

European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The EBID is the organization providing funds for the new safe confinement project,

the huge arch that's going to be rolled over the top of the damaged reactor building.

Well that's his main focus. Mr Novak's also sensitive to the lives affected by the Chernobyl accident.

Some of the people predominantly all people have decided to return to their houses in the exclusion zone.

It must be hard.

Hard life for them.

But it must have been a very hard life for them to live in a skyscraper on the 25th floor after they spend their entire life living here in the nature of the

Absolutely. Yvonne Kyiv my goodness used to be a stop for having a cup of tea or coffee on a way to

Chernobyl this journey I used to do every weekend.

Good evening the Soviet Union admitted this evening that there's been an accident at one of its nuclear

...