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Sixty-two-year-old Sergii Mirnyi will never forget the year 1986, when he was sent to help deal with the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl that was threatening to poison the continent. Mirnyi was a reserve lieutenant in the Soviet Army, a physical chemist, and a chemical task force leader who led a team of so-called liquidators tasked with measuring radiation and evacuating villages near Chernobyl in the months following the accident.
Mirnyi went back to working as a physical chemist after the disaster, but what he had witnessed—particularly the evacuations and the upheaval for people affected by the event—stuck with him and became the center of his research years later when he started studying the long-term health of liquidators. In 2008, he founded the company Chernobyl Tours, which takes tourists into the 2,600-square-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to educate them about radiation. Last year, Mirnyi went a step further, ...
