Wind, quietly humming through treetops, is the only voice you'll hear in Pripyat, a mile or so from Chernobyl. And it is this same wind that finally gave voice to the world's worst nuclear disaster. Without it, the fanatically secretive Soviet regime might have kept this devastation cloaked for a week, perhaps a month, perhaps longer.

		Bill Toland is a Post-Gazette staff writer (btoland@post-gazette.com).

As it was, the wind carried the radioactive fallout 1,000 miles, all the way to Sweden. On April 28, 1986, radiation alarms sounded at the country's Forsmark nuclear power plant. Puzzled engineers detected xenon and krypton in the air, and soon determined that the leaks weren't coming from Forsmark at all. They were coming, instead, from the southeast.

Still, almost three full days passed before Moscow would tersely admit that "an accident has occurred" at the No. 4 Chernobyl reactor. The "accident" was this -- a 1,000-megawatt power generator in Chernobyl, 80 miles north of Kiev in Ukraine, had exploded on April 26. Super-heated uranium fuel rods disintegrated, clashing with outside oxygen, creating fireballs ferocious enough to lift a thousand-ton lid from the top of the reactor.

Fires burned for days. Fallout rained down on the continent.

In the week that followed, 1,000 square miles -- and nearly 350,000 people -- were evacuated. The meltdown's official human toll is in the mid-50s, but various health groups expect that thousands -- 4,000? 10,000? 300,000? -- will die early deaths.

Invisible remnants of the explosion linger 20 years later, in the soil, in the water, in the slimy moss spreading across the sidewalks of Pripyat. Yuri Tatarchuck, our tour guide, waved his Geiger counter above the moss, and the digital numbers climbed, an indication of the ever-present nuclear phantom.

We stood on top of that Pripyat apartment building, 16 stories high, surveying the sad emptiness and the dormant power plant on the horizon. Pripyat had once been home to 50,000. Now it was home to abandoned high-rises and a never-used amusement park. And it was home, of course, to a heroic wind that still whispers nightmare echoes of a long-ago disaster.

The editor had pulled the young and mostly philistine reporter into his office and said -- to the surprise of at least one of the people in the room -- "You're going to Chernobyl."

A reporter's career is punctured by acute moments of self-doubt. This was one of those moments, followed by a compulsory moment of blinding, dumb-faced panic. It's likely that he would have been more confident if he'd known where exactly Chernobyl was. The editor talked, and the reporter, 8 years old when the meltdown happened, mentally whittled through a list of destinations. Does this mean I'm going to Russia? Ukraine? Bolivia? Yugoslavia?

Does Yugoslavia even exist anymore?

And isn't Bolivia in South America? Maybe I'm thinking of Belarus.

The reporter should have known this. Radiation was metaphorically, and perhaps literally, in his blood. He grew up in Apollo, Pa., where the words Babcock & Wilcox, NUMEC and Atlantic Richfield are still blasphemous, 24 years after the detestable nuclear processing plant closed. In the 1960s and 1970s, the plant routinely misplaced impressive heaps of uranium, as if they were dealing with a set of car keys. Radiation spewed, in unhealthy amounts, from the riverside smokestacks -- the company line was that the uranium had "escaped." Neighbors got cancer, and some died.

The reporter left Apollo and worked for the Beaver County Times, which wasn't far from the Shippingport nuclear power plant. He'd write stories about the plant, and the people who worked there, the two-legged guinea pigs. He wrote about a place in Aliquippa where they furnished uranium billets, and a place in Beaver Falls where the workers inhaled toxic beryllium and plutonium dust as they unknowingly researched the world's first atomic airplane.

Later he would take a job in Harrisburg, near Three Mile Island. He'd write about that place, too.

Now, in 2002, he was going to Chernobyl.

The reporter, looking back on his life and short career, has noticed a clear trend.

Let's presume that Chernobyl and its surrounds are as haunting today as they were nearly four years ago when I visited. Let's assume the schools are still vacant, apartment buildings cluttered with litter, the radioactive mold is still growing on the sidewalks. Let's also assume that the only inhabitants of this evacuated zone, besides security employees, are those who sneak in illegally and against the advice of the Ukrainian government.

Should it always be this way?

This young and mostly philistine reporter hopes not.

The nuclear bogeyman still frightens us, but as with most bedtime creeps, a thorough check under the bed might reassure us that what we've been fearing all these years isn't as scary as we'd made it out to be. Maybe the monster isn't even there anymore.

Today, Ukranian President Viktor Yushchenko wants to return to Chernobyl. Public tours are already available -- he'd like to see more. Maybe the whole area can be converted into a biological preserve -- in the absence of humans, wildlife has returned to the area, and seems to be doing fine. Bears, wolves, boars, cranes, wild horses and rare spotted eagles have all been sighted.

The explosion itself may have loosed 400 times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb, but that was then. Today, experts are in agreement that current radiation levels don't pose any great threat to human health, as long as water and food is brought in from elsewhere. A new concrete reactor tomb must be built to ensure the area's future livability, but with enough money, it can be done.

So there's hope that from the Chernobyl wreckage, something, anything, can be salvaged. Hope that this ghost-town monument to the supreme Faustian bargain will someday become a monument to a supreme rebirth. Maybe winds of change, 20 years later, are finally blowing through.