https://www.rt.com/news/461348-chernobyl-disaster-tarakanov-hbo/https://www.rt.com/news/461152-chernobyl-general-tarakanov-reacts-hbo/Not for the faint-hearted: The Children of Chernobyl. (video)
This is a greatly abbreviated version of an original much more harrowing documentary. Google the same term for more on that topic.
If you want to really feel the atmosphere of the Exclusion zone:
http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/A Ukrainian woman who likes to go exploring the Zone on her motorbike. Father is a nuclear scientist, and she knows what she is doing.
But put aside all talk of half-lives and how long radioactive contamination takes to become 'safe' (ask the people of Iraq about how 'safe' DU is, and check out the current tragic and still rising birth defect rates.) Put aside that Chernobyl is not the worst contamination disaster, Fukushima is, and still ongoing. Most of the major food growing area of Japan is contaminated, Tokyo really _should_ be evacuated (but that's impossible), the Nth Pacific Ocean is dying, and the US West Coast is getting seriously hit, while both Japan and US governments are actively suppressing related news. Such as the shocking childhood thyroid cancer rates in Japan now.
Forget all that. You know why I oppose any and all use of nuclear fission power?
Because Earth regularly gits hit by major meteorite impacts. Every few tens of thousands of years. Geological record is clear. The most recent big one was probably the Hiawatha crater in Greenland, about 12000 years ago. That one nearly sent Homo Sapiens extinct worldwide. If we'd had civilization and hundreds of nuclear power plants, along with thousands of tons of high level radioactive waste in containment dumps at that time, it would have sent ALL LIFE ON EARTH extinct, for a million years.
Having one or two (or five- Chelyabinsk, Semipalatinsk, Komsomolets) nuclear contamination disasters is bad enough. We can survive that. Massive natural disasters happen, and life can survive that too. But not a natural disaster that smears dozens, hundreds of nuclear plants and waste dumps across the landscape. That's a terminal event. Background radiation level goes higher than any complex lifeform can reproduce in reliably over multiple generations. Even if it doesn't kill everything outright.
Don't even bother prattling on about 'meteor defenses.' We can't. And by the time we can, we'll have fusion power anyway (much safer, no high nuclear weight long-life isotopes, no tons of radioactive fuel in reactors.)