Eerie photos capture BI’s journey into the ghost town near Chernobyl. 50,000 people lived here before nuclear disaster struck.

• Business Insider recently traveled to Pripyat, an abandoned town next to Chernobyl.

• Pripyat was evacuated right after the 1986 disaster at the nuclear power plant.

• The city is a complete ghost town. These photos show what it’s like now.

PRIPYAT, Ukraine — There’s a silence in Pripyat that’s unsettling but also hauntingly peaceful. There’s no traffic or commotion in the streets or on the sidewalks. In fact, there are no cars or people at all in this city.

Pripyat had the deep misfortune of being situated only a few miles down the road from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in what is now northern Ukraine.

At its peak, nearly 50,000 people lived in Pripyat, an industrial city established in 1970 near the Belarusian border. It had everything one might need, from a grocery store to a restaurant. It was a relatively new city with a vibrant community.

But on April 26, 1986, disaster struck at Chernobyl.

One of the plant’s reactors exploded, sending highly radioactive contamination into the air across the Soviet Union and into Europe. Pripyat was evacuated the day after the deadly meltdown that killed 30 operators and first responders. It’s now a ghost town.

Business Insider recently traveled to Pripyat deep inside the now-established Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a highly radioactive area of 1,000 square miles that encompasses the nuclear power plant.

Getting to Pripyat was no easy task. Visitors need a permit to enter the exclusion zone, which is about a two-hour drive north of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. We met our guide at the entrance, which is a military checkpoint. The soldiers looked over our documents before allowing us into the restricted area.

Driving to Pripyat through the actual town of Chernobyl and past the nuclear power plant is a constant reminder that Ukraine is at war.

The Russian army initially occupied this area during the early days of the invasion three years ago, but it’s now back under Ukrainian control. There are soldiers, checkpoints, armored vehicles, and fortifications everywhere.

When we finally arrived in Pripyat — the former main road into the city is full of potholes that made it difficult to travel — we were on the clock. The International Atomic Energy Agency says that the lingering radioactive isotopes in the atmosphere are at tolerable exposure levels but only for limited periods of time. We couldn’t stay for too long.

We walked through the city, careful not to stray too far from the path the guide had taken.

A glance around the town reveals emblems from the former Soviet Union on street lights and atop buildings. The city was silent — abandoned in every sense. Vegetation creeps into the buildings, some of which no longer have windows. Beyond a Ukrainian military vehicle that was there only briefly and two other visitors, no one else was around.

These photos show just how eerie it is in Pripyat:

When it was time to leave, we packed up the car and headed back to Chernobyl, where a soldier went through my camera to make sure I didn’t take any photos of sensitive military sites.

Heading out, we drove through a checkpoint, where we had to stand in radiation detector devices. These resembled the rectangular scanners at an airport. These devices checked our clothes, shoes, and hands for any radioactive residue. To my surprise, I was clean.

Still, when I returned to my hotel in Kyiv, I washed everything I had with me.

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