I doubt there are that many nearby cities that are uninhabitable, the area north west of Chernobyl wasn't all that populated other than with smaller villages and farms. Had the wind blown south it would have been much worse, Kiev is just two hours away by car.
As for the huge junkyard - yes, they still exist for the simple reason that noone wants to touch them unless it's really needed. All vehicles used in rescue operations are, afaik, abandoned to 'be taken care of later'. Worse is, that the whole city is a trash-/junkyard more or less, due to looting.
Can't say we learned anything about this in school though, even though Sweden was one of the major recievers of radioactive dust. We mostly read about ww2.
Anyway, as you say, my intent was never to show off my awesome photo skills, because I have none. I did no (intentional) mixing with white balance and saturation, I used the 'auto' setting on my camera because it's simple to use and gives decent results without spending minutes per shot or taking 5 test pics before deciding on a setting.
I just got lucky to visit a pretty uncommon, yet historical, place, and thought I'd share some pics.
The first pic was taken through the window of our minivan while we stopped at a checkpoint, unfortunately I couldn't get out to get a better view of anything. Little comfort though that you wouldn't see much of the town from there anyway. There are only a few houses at the city limit, then comes a long alley with trees, and maybe 500m later comes the town. The thing is that the city is extremely overgrown, looks more or less like a jungle with houses squeezed inbetween the trees.
The only area that is not overgrown is the main square, I guess the concrete did a better job shielding off sunlight there.
The third one is a very 'common' motive, but I couldn't leave without taking a picture of it. The ferris wheel was never used btw, it was supposed to have its grand opening in may 1986, but now noone even got to test ride it.
I would have preferred the bumper cars.
I think it's very interesting! I have probably learned about the Chernobyl Disaster, but damned if I could remember exactly what went on... crazy how the town is just a junk yard, without anyone taking the stuff to the garbage. But I spose that's a lot of stuff. Btw do you have any more pictures?