Not Your Average Chernobyl Disaster Porn

Crackling Geiger counters. Obligatory shots of abandoned children's toys and decaying amusement park rides. Dead trees that won't decay.

These are hallmarks of Chernobyl disaster porn, and this new Veritasium tour of Pripyat, the abandoned town that served the Chernobyl nuclear reactor before its meltdown in 1986, has no shortage of them. But more than than anything else, it has the scientific authority of a documentary. It's like a tour from a real estate agent showing you around a new area, but with dueling intentions; enticing you to visit while warning you away.

"This could be pristine wilderness, but it's not," says host Derek Muller. "It's a contaminated, deserted, wasteland. This is what a real post apocalyptic world looks like."

"This is what the world would look like if man disappeared one day, all of the sudden," he adds. In case you were wondering.

And if you were also wondering about the progress of the new structure being built to contain the fallout, Muller checks that out too. It's a welcome antidote to all the doom-and-gloom. Now, about that atomic lake.