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Pripyat: The Nuclear City and its Guided Tours

In 1970, the Soviet Union founded a settlement that would one day be the city of Pripyat ( Прип'ять) .  Pripyat is in the extreme north of the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic, named after the nearby Pripyat River, which originates in Ukraine, and flows mostly through modern-day Belarus.  The city of Pripyat officially became a city in 1979, after enough people had moved there.  Pripyat was the ninth Nuclear City in the Soviet Union.  Nuclear cities are quite literally that: cities built around nuclear power plants.  Throughout the 1970s, the main reason one might live in Pripyat was to service the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant.  By the time the population had hit 49,000 in 1979, it was officially a city. Pripyat, Ukraine SSR, circa 1980     Pripyat was what was called a “closed city”.  This doesn’t mean access was restricted, like it might be around a military base.  You were free to come and go; all that was “closed” was the purpose of the city: produci