Chernobyl, the HBO miniseries about the greatest nuclear power disaster the planet has ever known, has been a massive hit around the world (although its grasp of Russian political dynamics is reportedly woeful).
But the big winner has been… tourism?
Yes, people are keen to see the site of the biggest nuclear accident in history, with bookings jumping 40 per cent in the last few weeks, according to Reuters. They… they know Emily Watson’s not actually there, right?
Looks… um, lovely?
Sadly, tourist tours of the abandoned Ukraine city of Pripyat now show less and less to visitors. That’s not because of secrets, or even because of the radiation around the site – which is still high, which is why tourists get day trips rather than camping holidays – but because three decades of being left to the elements means the buildings are starting to literally fall over.
In fact, if you’ve ever wondered what a city would look like once human vanished, Pripyat is the answer: forests have reclaimed much of the city and operators are terrified of a tourist popping into a building just in time for a wall to collapse on them.
A real fixer-upper!
Adorably this is the backdrop against which the less renewable energy-found bits of the Australian government and their conservative cheerleaders have decided to start arguing that Australia needs to embrace nuclear energy.
And that should definitely work, the second that a wind turbine falls over and somehow sends a cloud of deadly radiation across half the hemisphere.
You might be in for a wait, Scott, is what we’re saying.