Former residents of the evacuated region around Chernobyl raise a toast to dead family members. Evacuees are allowed to return each spring for Parent's Day—a holiday to visit graves and honor the memory of departed parents and other ancestors. The melancholy remembrance takes on an added dimension here, as families commemorate not only relatives but also a lost way of life.

This haunting monument will ultimately be dismantled. After ten years of complicated negotiations, work is expected to start later this year on a new sarcophagus, developed by the Battelle Memorial Institute, Bechtel Group, Électricité de France, and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Longer than a football field, taller than the Statue of Liberty, costing perhaps 800 million dollars, the so-called New Safe Confinement (NSC) is designed as a giant steel arch. For safety, it will be built at a distance from the sarcophagus and then slid into place. It will be the largest moveable structure ever built.

Construction is expected to take four to five years, and it won't be easy. After the accident, reactor fuel and radioactive waste were buried haphazardly around the sarcophagus, where workers will have to excavate to build the NSC's foundation. "Who knows what we'll find down there," says project engineer Fabien Sauvadet.

Once the NSC is in place, remotely operated cranes will allow engineers to painstakingly dismantle the old sarcophagus. But the shattered reactor and its tons of nuclear fuel, far too radioactive to handle even from a distance, will stay where it is for now.

Away from ground zero, wildlife has reclaimed the hundreds of square miles of abandoned land in the exclusion zone. More than a hundred wolves prowl the forest, endangered black storks and white-tailed eagles nest in the marshes, and several dozen Przewalski's horses, a rare breed that went extinct in the wild decades ago, are thriving after being released here in 1998. Pines are even reclaiming the Red Forest, though patches of lingering radioactivity have left them stunted and deformed, with unnaturally short or long needles and clusters of buds where normally there would be just one. This radiation-warped forest is an anomaly. On the whole, ecologists marvel at how resilient nature has proved to be in the face of radiological adversity.

So have people. The exclusion zone was vacated after the Chernobyl explosion. But within months some residents were drifting back, in defiance of Ukrainian authorities. Today 400 mostly elderly people live in the decaying wooden villages that dot the zone, and the government has mellowed enough to provide electricity and bus service to nearby towns for shopping.

In the village of Opachichi, population 19, a rooster and hens strut next to the weathered cottage of Anna and Vasily Yevtushenko. She has just turned 70; he's 66. Vasily, dressed in gray trousers and a plaid lumberjack-style shirt, does most of the talking. We stand in a corner under a painted wooden icon of the Virgin Mary and glance through a photo album. "This is our daughter," Vasily says, and then, pointing to the opposite leaf, "this is our cow."

A week after the accident, Anna and Vasily were evacuated to a village a hundred miles (161 kilometers) away. "We didn't enjoy the place; the climate was wrong," Vasily says. Two years later they reclaimed their cottage in Opachichi. "We have everything we need," Vasily says, including home-brewed vodka.

Vasily shows me the results of blood tests he and Anna took in 2004. Everything looks normal. "If there was something, we would have already died," he says. Anna chimes in. "People ask me why I am not afraid," she says, smiling a mouthful of gold fillings. "I say this is my own house. I get up in the morning, I have chores to do. That's all."

If Opachichi is a living relic of a nuclear nightmare, Pripyat is more like the clock found in the rubble of Hiroshima, its lifeless hands forever stuck at the moment of detonation. After passing through a checkpoint with a red-and-white-striped gate to deter looters and the merely curious, I meander through what was once a tidy town. Rows of white and pastel apartment blocks stand vacant, their windows dark and their lower stories overgrown. Near a kindergarten and a sports complex with a swimming pool, now empty and debris-strewn, that Olesya recalled from her childhood stands a rusted Ferris wheel, its yellow cars groaning in the wind. It had been built just in time for May Day 1986.

The Energetik cultural palace, a grand hall where dances and concerts were held, presides over a desolate square. Poplars are pushing up through the pavement. Moss in the cracks sets a Geiger counter chattering. Although rains have cleansed some surfaces, a skein of hot spots will keep this soulless shell radioactive for a lifetime.

"What's so spooky about standing in the heart of Pripyat is not the destruction to the concrete and steel," says Ron Chesser. "It's the lack of people, the silence." Over time, the radionuclides will run through their half-lives, the survivors' fears will fade. But this loneliness knows no cure.