This city, the heart of the Chernobyl "dead zone," is a silent testament to the world's worst nuclear disaster.
All the inhabitants are gone.A motionless ferris wheel dominates the cracked pavement of a deserted amusement park. Bumper cars sit rusting. A merry-go-round moves slowly in the wind.
And in the center of the zone is the hulking gray "sarcophagus" that was hastily built over the radioactive ruins of the fourth Chernobyl reactor after it exploded and caught fire 11 years ago April 26. The explosion killed at least 32 people and sent radiation skyward, exacting human and environmental tolls that still aren't fully known.
Pripyat was once a thriving city of 46,000, built especially for Chernobyl workers and their families. Today, only a few police and workers monitor the 19-mile zone around the plant for the disaster's lingering effects. Those who go into Pripyat leave the city at the end of their shifts.
A few elderly people have moved back to their villages inside the "dead zone," but none lives in Pripyat.
But while the abandoned city wears the physical scars of Chernobyl, the rest of Ukraine still lives with the fallout in the form of everyday energy problems, an added weight on the country's listless economy.
Ukraine remains strapped by its fuel dependence on Russia and mired in mismanagement, inefficiency and debt that keep the nation constantly on the edge of an energy crisis.
The country gets 45 percent of its energy from its five nuclear power plants, but the stations are dangerously short of cash.
Some residents in Kiev, the capital, have spent the last nine months without hot water. One railroad line was so desperate for diesel fuel it has taken a pair of barrel-nosed steam engines built in 1948 out of mothballs.
When Ukraine gained independence from Moscow in 1991 it inherited an aging Soviet-era industrial base - as well as outdated policies and attitudes toward energy use. It still relies on Russia for nuclear fuel, more than 80 percent of its gas and 95 percent of its oil.
Urged on by the West, Ukraine has haltingly begun to restructure the energy sector, but has hesitated to hike prices, break up regional monopolies and force debtor enterprises to pay for power.
Worried the energy troubles are bankrupting the economy and slowing reforms, President Leonid Kuchma says lowering consumption is crucial.
One of the four Chernobyl reactors is still operating, though it is expected to be shut down by 2000 with massive amounts of Western aid.
In an agreement reached this week with the Group of Seven industrialized nations, Ukraine agreed to shore up the cracking sarcophagus and build a new shell around it. Funding is to come from yet-to-be-determined foreign aid.
But officials say Ukraine's cash-poor nuclear plants will be unable to complete routine repairs this summer, adding to worries about the nuclear fuel inside Chernobyl's deteriorating steel-and-concrete mausoleum.
"It is not under our complete control, and information about it is insufficient," Chernobyl deputy general director Valentin Kupny said of the sarcophagus. "We do not know yet what is going on in there."