An abandoned Ferris wheel stands in a public space overgrown with trees in the former city center of Pripyat, Ukraine, on September 30, 2015. Pripyat lies only a few kilometers from the former Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and was built in the 1970s to house the plant's workers and their families. Today Pripyat is a ghost-town, its apartment buildings, shops, restaurants, hospital, schools, cultural center, and sports facilities derelict and its streets overgrown with trees. The city lies in the inner exclusion zone around Chernobyl where hot spots of persistently high levels of radiation make the area uninhabitable for thousands of years to come. #

A gigantic steel arch under construction in 2013, built to cover the remnants of the exploded reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine on August 25. Reactor number four at power plant was the scene of a major explosion in 1986, resulting in the evacuation of the nearby town and the ongoing legacy of protecting against any possible radiation leaks. #

An assistant holds up a photo showing the city of Pripyat's main square and the ‘Energetik’ cultural center before 1986, at the same site that today is abandoned and overgrown with trees on September 29, 2015, in Pripyat, Ukraine. #

A man lights candles at a memorial, dedicated to firefighters and workers who died after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, during a night service near the Chernobyl plant in the city of Slavutych, Ukraine, on April 25, 2015. #

An abandoned Soviet Cold War-era radar system known as ‘The Woodpecker’ used to detect incoming missiles stands inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone on September 30, 2015, near Chernobyl, Ukraine. The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a 2,600-square-kilometer restricted access zone established in the contaminated area around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. While workers employed at the Chernobyl site today and a small number of returnees live in the outer zone, no one is allowed to live in the inner zone, where hot spots of radiation make the area uninhabitable for thousands of years to come. #

A wolf in a wild wood near Ukraine's Chernobyl in April of 2012. Some species of mammals are found to be thriving without the effect of human contact in the area. According to a study published in the journal Current Biology, led by environmental scientist Jim Smith at Britain's University of Portsmouth, the nature reserve zone extending north from Chernobyl power plant into Belarus, found that elk, deer, wild boar, and wolves are now abundant in the Polesie Reserve which was established after the 1986 disaster. #

A worker from the State Radiation Ecological Reserve tests radiation levels at a farm in Vorotets on April 21, 2011, close to the 30-kilometer exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. One fifth of Belarus' agricultural land was contaminated following the blast at the nuclear reactor in the Ukraine and around 70 percent of the fallout fell in Belarus. #

Ivan Semenyuk, 80, and his wife Marya Kindrativna stand outside their house located inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone on September 30, 2015 in Parushev, Ukraine. Parushev, a village that before 1986 had a population of about 600, lies 13 kilometers from the former Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Authorities evacuated 120,000 people, including the residents of Parushev. Semenyuk and Kindrativna, along with a few other elderly residents, were allowed to return a year later and have lived there ever since. While radiation levels in Parushev are negligible, the village lies in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone that covers 2,600 square kilometers and only a few elderly people have dared to return. Semenyuk grows corn, beets, potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, and pumpkins, forages for mushrooms in nearby forests and has a stall with 13 chickens. A bus selling provisions still comes by around once a month, though visits by a medical team to Parushev have ceased. #

Rotting wooden chairs stand under a collapsed ceiling in the damp and abandoned auditorium of the ‘Energetika’ cultural center on September 29, 2015, in Pripyat, Ukraine. #

A book of Ukrainian literature lies among books, clothes, and other items strewn on the floor in an abandoned music school of Zalisya village located inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone on September 29, 2015. #

Moose stand in the state radiation ecology reserve inside the 30-kilometer exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor near the village of Babchin, some 370 km ( 231 miles) south-east of Minsk, Belarus, on March 22, 2011. #

Instrument panels in the control room of reactor number two and nearly identical to the panels in the control room of reactor four stand inside the former Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant on September 29, 2015. The Chernobyl plant is currently undergoing a decades-long decommissioning process of reactors one, two, and three, which continued operation for years following the accident at reactor four. #

A visitor's dosimeter shows a radiation reading of just under one microsievert per hour, which is still considered safe, outside the encased remains of reactor number four at the former Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant on September 29, 2015. #

A lynx roams close to Ukraine's Chernobyl in December of 2012. Nearly 30 years after a nuclear reactor caught fire and spewed a lethal cloud of radiation, some species of mammals are found to be thriving without the effect of human contact in the area. #

A containment shelter for the damaged fourth reactor (left) and the New Safe Confinement (NSC) structure (right) at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant are seen from Ukraine's abandoned town of Pripyat, on March 23, 2016. #

A Belarussian woman visits her abandoned house during ‘Radunitsa,’ or the Day of Rejoicing, a holiday in the Eastern Orthodox Church to remember the dead, in the abandoned village of Orevichi, near the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, southeast of Minsk, April 21, 2015. Every year residents, who left their villages after the Chernobyl blast, gather at the cemeteries for a day to visit their relatives' graves, and to meet with former friends and neighbors. #