'Chernobyl' miniseries sends curious tourists to Lithuania

An HBO miniseries featuring Soviet-era nuclear nightmares has sparked global interest in the 1986 'Chernobyl' disasters and boosted tourism in Lithuania. The Baltic country, which served as the filming location for "Chernobyl," has become a destination of so-called atomic tourism since the program aired earlier this year.

At Ignalina nuclear power plant, Mikhail Nefedyev was staring grimly at the row of blinking green lights on a control panel when another group of curious visitors poured into his realm. The 64 year-old engineers explained to them what exactly happened when a similar reactor exploded in Chernobyl, Ukraine, 33 years ago.

The Ignalina plant is of the same prototype as the one in Chernobyl. It has similar blueprints and the same water-cooled graphite-moderated reactors with a capacity of 1,500 megawatts of power. Ignalina was shut down a decade ago. Closing and decommissioning it were key conditions of Lithuania's entry to the European Union in 2004. In 1986, Lithuania, then part of the Soviet empire, was one of the republics affected by the nuclear disaster. Thousands were sent to clean up the mess in Chernobyl. Many of them are dead. Today, the nuclear disaster is helping Lithuania grow as a tourist destination.

'Chernobyl,' a highly-rated miniseries, continues to send curious watchers to the filming locations in the capital Vilnius and at Ignalina, where glowing uranium rods cool in concrete pools. The plant, which is still open for tourists, drew 2,240 visitors in 2018. By July, 1,630 had visited the plant. And demand is growing, plant officials said. "They have made a good movie, I guess. But what happened long ago does not bother us now. I think looking backward is not good," Nefedyev said, after explaining how the RBMK-type reactor blew up.