Radiophobia is full of images that hit with the power of a sledgehammer and frightful ideas that resonate long after the film is over. Although the accident at Chernobyl’s reactor #4 was an immediate disaster, the nearby city of Pripyat was not evacuated for several days. A late Soviet model city of the future, the doomed community had 50,000 residents, 50,000 rose bushes, and a hospital boasting the slogan “The Health of the People Is the Wealth of the Country.” Twenty years later, residents return for the first time to a once familiar landscape to find themselves lost in a ghostly world of destruction, a Solaris-like world here on earth. We won’t know the full legacy of Chernobyl in our lifetime—this twenty-year checkup is just a blip in the lifespan of plutonium’s destructive power.  TBW