this is bbc news, the headlines: president trump has urged americans to be immunised against measles, despite previously casting doubt on the vaccination. health officials believe the recent rise in people contracting the virus is partly connected to misinformation about the jab. 270 students and staff are in quarantine after cases were confirmed at two universities in california. sri lanka's prime minister has told the bbc that he considered sri lanka's security forces have said 15 bodies have been recovered in the hunt for those responsible for the easter sunday attacks. earlier, sri lanka's prime minister has told the bbc that he considered resigning in the wake of the easter sunday bomb attacks. he said he simply "wasn't in the loop" for a briefing on warnings of a possible terrorist plot received two weeks before 250 people were killed. severe flood warnings have been issued in mozambique as cyclone kenneth, the second in as many months, moves further inland. there are fears that hundreds of thousands of people will need humanitarian aid.

now on bbc news — it's time for our world. when the chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded 33 years ago it was the largest ever accidental release of radioactivity into the environment. but what's become of the people who refused to leave the exclusion zone, and the wildlife left behind? victoria gill has been given rare permission to go inside the zone — and the plant itself. surrounding the site of the world's worst nuclear accident, more than 4,000 square kilometres, spanning ukraine and belarus, was abandoned. more than three decades on, in a post—human landscape, nature has taken over. what happened to those who refused to leave?

has the truth about this place become lost in the infamy of the disaster? standing a kilometre from where the nuclear accident happened, we're getting less of an external dose of radiation than on the flight over? three times less than what we got on the aeroplane coming over. all: i love you. welcome to bbc news. i'm reghed ahmad. our top stories: what does the future hold for those who still live in the shadow of chernobyl? sri lanka's security forces say 15 bodies and bomb—making equipment have been recovered in the hunt for those behind the easter sunday attacks. a race against time — president trump urges people to get vaccinated after measles outbreaks force two universities to quarantine staff and students. 130 kilometres north of the capital, kiev, part of ukraine has been cut off for more than 30 years. heading for the exclusion zone, they have to get the shot, the which is quite exciting. vaccinations are so important. this is really going around now. they sort of a forbidden place kind of shrouded in mystery. have to get their shots. this is a controlled zone, as spain prepares to choose its next government, protestors say a contaminated area the vox party's divisive message

threatens to set the country back. almost twice the size of london, and a new exhibition opens exploring the life and work of maverick that we have special permission to visit. we're going into the epicentre of an explosion. it happened on 26 april 1986, a day the world never forget. archive: the soviet union admitted this evening that there's been an accident at one of its nuclear power stations. archive: perhaps the worst accident in the short history of the world's nuclear power industry. we're taking a tour of the chernobyl nuclear power plant with our guide, stanislav. safety regulations mean we have to protect our clothes from radioactive dust. if know one rule. if you follow all rules, you don't break rules, everything will be ok. and 28 year, a little bit more past after my first coming to chernobyl npp and everything is ok,

god bless us. with us is a scientist whose life's work has hinged on that one terrifying night in soviet history. how long have you been studying the aftermath of what happened here? since 1990. have you ever been into the reactor building before? i've never been before. reactor number 4 still leaks radiation, so it's entombed by a steel confinement structure containing remains that were blasted apart. this is footage captured beneath that dome. a now solidified mass of concrete and nuclear fuel is still so radioactive that people can't be under here for more than a few minutes. but the plant continued to produce power until the year 2000, and the neighbouring reactor is still being decommissioned.

few visitors are allowed in here but we've been given permission to look inside. alarm beeping. is your alarm going off? that's my alarm going off, yeah. what is it? what have we gone up to? we've gone up to 1a, and i set the amber warning to be at10. right. so we've just gone over that. throughout our trip, jim is carrying a dosimeter, measuring the radiation dose we're getting every hour. we're still well below the level where i considered we didn't want to get to. but i'm just going to switch it off because we don't want it going all the time. there's a strange atmosphere to this place. and you're so trussed up, that there's a nervousness, there's a fear to that, i think. my heart's beating quite fast, actually! it was 1:23am when engineers cut power to parts of the chernobyl plant number 4 reactor.

they were testing what would happen in the event of a blackout. what they didn't know was the reactor was already unstable. it wasn'tjust one person, it was a whole chain of people, from the reactor design people to the people operating it, to the whole kind of safety culture. the shutdown slowed turbines that drove a flow of cooling water to the reactor. the reactor collapsed, the reactor collapsed, everything collapsed, and when this engineer pushed the button to stop the chain reaction, big pressure of water, steam was coming from the bottom. a steam explosion blew the lid off the reactor, exposing the core to the atmosphere. airfuelled a fire that burned for ten days. that initial explosion killed two people. in the days that followed,

emergency workers rushed in. people known as liquidators were sent to remove highly radioactive material that had been blasted onto the roofs of nearby buildings so it could be swept up and contained. 134 emergency workers suffered acute radiation sickness. 28 died within months. another 19 have died since. some surviving workers today live with skin and eye injuries from working in that highly radioactive environment. and the impact wasn't confined to this site or even to this country. a cloud of radioactive smoke and dust was carried on the wind around europe. information emerged only gradually from behind the iron curtain of the soviet union. that cloud, though, carried the truth of the disaster. the world held its breath. this was the largest accidental release of radioactivity

into the environment in the history of nuclear power production. the cause, who is to blame, are issues still being debated to this day. every so—called accident, incident concerned with human factor. if there were some defects here in this type of reactor, who was the designer? a robot? no, a man. and if the personnel made some mistakes during that test, who were they, robots? no, the personnel. everywhere, we came to one conclusion and that is human factor everywhere practically. today, the consequences of that terrible accident are etched onto this region. within a boundary drawn at a 30—kilometre radius of the plant is the

primary exclusion zone. no—one was allowed to return here to live. but just beyond that, captured by an outer boundary, is a secondary zone where people have been left in limbo. the town of narodychi has a population of 2,500. tatyana runs the kindergarten. she remembers the evacuation. but the future for these children and theirfamilies is uncertain. narodychi has some of the lowest radiation levels

in the exclusion zone, but it's still officially designated contaminated. that means no agriculture is permitted and nothing new can be built here. so, could the secret to a new start for narodychi be hidden in the permanently abandoned primary zone? for many, it's a frightening place, but in the decade since the accident, hundreds of scientists have worked here, forensically examining chernobyl‘s aftermath. we're going to meet a true exclusion zone expert. dr sergey gashchak came here in the immediate aftermath as one of the thousands of liquidators. he's now a scientist.

although it's not legal to live here permanently, he still works here from this previously abandoned house. oh, this is a proper field station then. you have lockers for everybody‘s kit, somewhere to leave boots. yeah. this is very organised. is this a map of the exclusion zone? yeah. the red are the hot spots? yeah. where is the nuclear power plant? this is the power plant. for this international community of scientists, the zone is a vast laboratory allowing them to measure how a landscape recovers from nuclear catastrophe. altogether, this is the largest protected area in europe by a long way. they eat, sleep and discuss their work here but their days are spent out in the field. today, with the research team, we're looking for wildlife and following sergey, we eventually come across one of many now desolate villages. it's become a strangely rich habitat and a place sergey seems totally at home.

i am a feral man. yes, you're a feral man! laugh. yeah, sometimes i see my family not so often. it's just completely taken over. which is why these villages have sort of become hubs for where some of these ecological studies can be done, because this is just a totally different place. it's not a village anymore, it's sort of a rewilded landscape. inside some of these houses, it's still apparent just how quickly people had to leave. here, we can see someone's coat. yes, yes, absolutely. but some of what people left behind, through farming and gardening, has turned into provisions for wild animals. people, before the accident, introduced here a lot of plants. also, they fertilised the soil.

and the soil in the villages is a little bit richer than the surrounding areas. that is why, according to our study, they have started to observe higher levels of diversity of animals. we have wolf. just outside the village, there are some obvious signs of animal life that moved in when people moved out. you wanted to see wolf faeces. we have fresh wolf faeces. jim smith is with sergey to check cameras and audio recorders that have been silently monitoring the wildlife. all these years combining the tracking of animal populations and measuring the contamination suggests wildlife is now thriving in a place that many had assumed to be toxic. yes, the exclusion zone's contaminated, but if we were to put it on a map of radiation dose worldwide, only the small hotspots would stand out. natural radioactivity‘s

all around us. it varies from country to country, from place to place. and most of the area of the exclusion zone gives rise to lower radiation dose rates than many areas of natural radioactivity worldwide. it may seem strange that most of this wilderness, that was created by a nuclear disaster, has similar levels of radiation to many parts of the populated world. but being here, surrounded by nature that doesn't observe any boundaries of checkpoints, it actually feels that life is flourishing. apart from glimpses on camera traps, though, i am yet to get close to any of chernobyl‘s wildlife. dr marina is following an unusual experiment. in 1998, zoologists released a herd

of endangered wild horses here in the hope they'd graze away over growth and reduce the risk of fire. marina's just spotted a whole herd. these are the przewalski's horses. gonna see if we can get a little tiny bit closer. they're a productive herd. so they have adult females, several cubs. several babies, foals. yes, ah, some of them are one years old, some of them are two years old. these animals are native to be open plains of mongolia, but marina's work is revealing some unexpected behaviour that's helping them thrive here. they use the abandoned buildings, because they are avoiding mosquitoes and heat and wind inside.

so they're adapting to the exclusion zone? yeah. they were laying and sleeping inside. so they have really good adapted to this place. they're really using the buildings. amazing. wildlife may be making the most obvious place, but not every village was left for natures to reclaim. we're deep in the permanently abandoned zone. and some people still live here. victoria. nice to meet you. today is maria's 78th birthday and she's made us breakfast. oh wow. thank you. up to the day of the accident, this had been the only

home she knew. her family then travelled back across a then patchily enforced boundary. maria and her neighbours make up a remote community ofjust 15. a tiny village reclaimed after the disaster.

the residents of this village are amongst just 200 self settlers who returned and stayed. the vast majority who lost their homes in the exclusion zone have no hopes of ever coming back. almost 50,000 of them lived here in pripyat. this was the soviet dream town, purpose built for workers at the power plant. it was evacuated overnight. no residents were allowed to return. just a few kilometres

from the plant, this is in one of the zone's hotspots. and after the city was permanently abandoned it gradually turned to ruin. but in recent years, human activity has come back. pripyat has been deemed safe to visit for short periods and is now a tourist destination. 60,000 people came here last year, keen to witness the decay. chernobyl was number one on the list. because it's, like, something that was in the news a lot when i was growing up as a kid. so it really took on the imagination. i wanted to see what it was like. it is sort of the post—apocalyptic environment, which, ithink, is very scary. the sense of danger here is now a selling point. but should we fear this place?

that is a question only be decades of research can answer. 0n the dry bed of what was the reservoir providing water to cool the nuclear reactors, we've come, with jim, to meet gennady laptev and his this team. we were just fly with the helicopter to look at the plant area, collecting samples of water, soil. he first came here just three months after the accident. his work helped shape the exclusion zone. this is more than half of my life. in the early stage of the accident, the most important was to understand what is the extent. to draw up the first map... to draw up the first maps, yes. then, of course, much later, as we know, the pattern of contamination is significantly different all over this area, yes.

and in this spot, with the help ofjim's dosimeter, it's clearjust how much the contamination varies and how much this place has changed. so here, standing essentially in the cooling pond of the nuclear power plant, a kilometre from where the nuclear accident happened, we are getting less external dose of radiation than on the flight over. three times less than what we got on the aeroplane coming over. so what could that mean for the outer zone? for narodychi? this is a community on the brink of change. the objective is to support and pray... jim and his colleagues are here for a meeting that could remove this district from the exclusion zone. meaning they could start

farming and building again. all of the stakeholders are here, representatives of the local community, the administration, those who run the exclusion zone, hopefully that agreement will be hammered out today. many here still fear chernobyl radiation, how it might affect their and their children's health. long—term impacts, though, have been hugely complicated to unpick. estimates of cancers directly caused by the radiation range from a few hundred cases to many thousands. the contamination is known to have caused 5,000 people, who were children at the time, to develop thyroid cancer. the vast majority were treated and cured. among numerous reports of birth defects and other health problems, it's just not clear if any were linked to radiation. what is conclusive, according to the world health organization, is that people's mental health has been damaged by fear of radiation and the disruption to their lives. this meeting could lift restrictions that this community has lived with ever since the accident. how did today go, do you think? we are certainly in agreement here that there needs to be change.

so the next step is to communicate with the politicians, tell them what our scientific conclusions are, tell them what the narodychi district want, and we hope that they will take action. what's finally on the horizon means that these narodychi's children may no longer be the children of chernobyl. if that political agreement can be reached, the next generation here could shape its own future. that disaster still casts a long shadow here and what happened in 1986 will always be

a feature of this place, but the research that's being carried out here shows that over 30 years the situation has changed and now, perhaps, for the sake of people who live here, hello. it will be a stormy start to the weekend for many parts of the uk. in fact, storm hannah has already brought power outages to parts of ireland. the winds have been escalating through the night and evere gales are expected quite

widely around the coast and the hills in the west. this is a deep area of low pressure so late into the season, of course, when the trees are now in full leaf in many areas so we do expect some damage to trees, buildings, power lines and that disruption to transport. there are warnings out there on the website for this storm, mostly for the winds but not entirely because it looks pretty wet as well. we've had one band of rain moving through the night. this next one coming in becomes a slow—moving feature, so with all the cloud around, it's not going to to be a cold start to this saturday morning, but it will be a very windy one. particularly for england and wales where we're expecting severe gales around the coast and over the hills, but inland we're expecting gales, gusts up to 55 miles per hour, which is pretty unusual anyway, and remember, we are very late in the season now. as well as that we've got this rain which will be persistent across parts of northern ireland, south—west scotland, into northern england, north wales, the midlands, across towards the humber and, with that rain and the wind combined, it is really going to feel quite chilly. temperatures barely reaching nine or 10 celsius. to the south, showery, and to north as well with some good spells of sunshine potentially for western scotland. but some heavy thundery showers around too.

and the afternoon may bring a strong wind to northern ireland, south—west scotland and the isle of man as well as north—west england and north wales. it will still continue to blow a gale or severe gale further south. a very windy day, certainly not a day for the outdoors. but the winds do ease through the night, and that's because storm hannah starts to blow out to the north sea. and we get a ridge of high pressure building for the second part of the weekend. it's not plain sailing but i think for the london marathon probably the day of the two and almost great conditions for the runners because it will stay cool, we think, quite a bit of cloud around, i think there will be some brightness coming through, and temperatures will be doing a little better than saturday. however, you can still see this weather front draped into western parts, so northern ireland and wales and south—west seeing further dank weather. further east we'll have the remnants of our weather front. in eastern areas, a few showers around. a cool northerly breeze will be much lighter. 12—15 looking like our highs. they're a little bit more respectable from the days ahead. then high—pressure starts the new week so it could be a bit chilly first thing monday.

could be a little bit of mist and fog around, but as the day wears on, we'll start to see this next weather system winding inself to bring some rain into the west. so generally we keep an unsettled picture into early next week. 00:27:14,066 --> 4294966103:13:29,430 bye— bye.