Nuclear Tourism: It’s Hot!
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 03.27.07 | 6:41 AM ET
It can also be hilarious, as this story demonstrates, but mostly it’s hot. Or, at least, strangely appealing to a certain type of traveler. David Wolman confirms this in the latest issue of Wired, where he writes about the popular Plutonium Tour at the Hanford nuclear-production site in Washington. “There’s pent-up demand for public tours of Hanford, which were suspended after 9/11,” Wolman writes. “Three years later, the tours quietly resumed with beefed-up security. Last fall, when the Web site for tour registration went live, all available spaces filled in just two minutes.”
What is it about nuclear sites that attracts people? Wolman doesn’t speculate, but in a Los Angeles Times story a couple years ago about Chernobyl tourism, Mary Mycio did. “The very knowledge of the buzzing background of radiation imbues even the prosaic act of walking down the street with an aura of excitement,” she wrote. “It isn’t the same adrenalin punch as bungee jumping in the Andes, but it is a palpable sensation—like being surrounded by ghosts.”
Adrenalin punch? Sure. A little wacky? That, too.
Related on World Hum:
* Power Trip
* Chernobyl. It’s the Latest Word in Adventure Travel.
Image: By Emily Maloney.
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
ryanair baggage allowance 07.20.07 | 10:41 PM ET
Now this is something odd.. It’s only today that I’ve heard of “nuclear tourism”. This is more than just “living on the edge”. It’s one step ahead of the extreme adventures, travel and sports that most people know as of the moment.