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...except people live in Chernobyl all the time. It wasn't evacuated. The plant itself kept working with the remaining reactors until like 2000. You might have meant Pripyat but nobody has seriously tried to decontaminate it. It was a city built specifically for nuclear plant, with no history to speak of, so there was no sense to restore it.

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It was evacuated immediately (some 100k people), no one is allowed to live in the exclusion zone (19 square miles) and yes the final reactor wasn't closed down until 2000 but the other two were closed down before then, unit 1 in 1996 and unit 2 in 1991. The only reason and despite world outcry that those reactors stayed in operation was because they had no choice. So either your ignorant of the facts or your trying to put a positive spin on a terrible and tragic event... which makes you a huge pos.

Why did they have no choice but to use the reactors for the next 14 years?

For the answer see...”dissolution of the Soviet Union”

Most of these 100k people lived in Pripyat. Chernobyl is to the south of the nuclear plant and wasn't as affected. According to [1] 12500 people lived there before the accident, currently about 600 people live there.

[1] https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A7%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%BE...

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