The settlement of Pripyat is five kilometers from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Its population numbered 50,000 until 1986. Today, Pripyat is a heavily guarded and highly contaminated ghost town in the center of the radioactive zone, which extends from Ukraine deep into Belarus. The villages were evacuated for the most part. Whoever wants to penetrate the barbed-wire fence surrounding the zone needs special permits, and those who wish to leave are checked for radioactive contamination. Approximately 15,000 people live or work here. Jobs at the power plant's Unit 3, which is still online, in the zone administration, and at the numerous research facilities are in demand because they are well paid. Many of the villages are inhabited. The residents are owners of buildings who were resettled and returned illegally but are now tolerated, and others who have found refuge in the many empty houses in this virtually unregulated zone. Pripyat tells of survival in an improvised microcosm in which nothing should be eaten or drunk, and where the dust should not be inhaled when stirred by the wind, however, as radioactivity cannot be detected by the human senses, virtually no one pays attention to these recommendations.