At 1.23am in the morning of 26th April 1986, a combination of human error, political mismanagement, and faulty reactor design led to an explosion at the fourth power unit of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the heart of Polissya in northern Ukraine. This event marked the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe. Vast quantities of radiation were released into the atmosphere, and many of these radioisotopes will persist in the environment for thousands of years. In response, 350,000 residents were evacuated from the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone which was set up around the destroyed nuclear reactor. Parts of the Zone will be uninhabitable into the distant future. At the time of the catastrophe, it was predicted the region would be a “dead zone,” incapable of supporting life. Since the evacuation, however, stories of nature’s resurgence have proliferated. Chornobyl’s “nuclear natures” are represented and imagined in diverse ways. Indeed, a spectacle has formed around Chornobyl with images and imaginaries of a postapocalyptic landscape, mutant ecologies, and resurgent nature becoming common refrains in public discourse. This thesis is interested in how such diverse interpretations of nature at Chornobyl have come to co-exist. It aims to produce situated reflections on the Zone’s nuclear natures – in other words, to offer a “counterspectacle” to the aforementioned images and imaginaries – that resist the temptation of singular narratives of recovery, return, monstrousness, and toxicity. To do so, mixed methods fieldwork was conducted in the Zone between 2019 and 2022. The thesis begins by contextualising itself within the emerging field of the Ukrainian Environmental Humanities and discussing the politics and ethics of conducting research in Ukraine in light of Russia’s full-scale invasion which begun on February 24th 2022. The following chapter then lays out a framework for conceptualising nuclear natures as spectacular, weird, and demanding of pragmatic and situated ethical reflection. This framework is then deployed through four empirical chapters. First, I outline Chornobyl’s diverse “representational fallout” across cinema, literature and poetry, art, and more, examining the cultural impact Chornobyl has had in the formation of Ukrainian ecological identity. Second, I examine the scientific field of “radioecology” to elucidate how Chornobyl’s nuclear natures are configured multiply, and how the impacts of radiation on ecology are contested. I unpack the scientific controversy that exists among radioecologists at Chornobyl, outlining a “radioecology of practices” through which radioecological knowledge is produced in the Zone. Third, I follow one particular study of Chornobyl’s wolves in detail to understand how scientific knowledge is translated into spectacular imaginaries. This chapter ties the weirdness of Chornobyl’s wilderness to the containment of nuclear natures within the Zone. When wildlife transgresses the Zone’s borders, it becomes a biosecurity threat; moving discursively from a sign of “radioactive resurgence” to be celebrated, to a contaminated, mutation-inducing threat to so-called uncontaminated wildlife outside the Zone. This chapter also examines the role of technologies in radioecological knowledge production. Fourth, deploying visual and ethnographic methods, I turn to examine the Zone’s vernacular ecologies, focusing on free-roaming dogs and those who live with and care for them in the Zone. “Contaminated care” is developed to account for the messy ethical relations inaugurated by nuclear natures. Progressing from spectacular to situated understandings of radioactive resurgence at Chornobyl, this thesis elucidates the multiplicity of nuclear natures, the politicised pathways through which they become known, and the situated ways in which people respond to contamination. In conclusion, I note the difficulty of determining either nature’s resurgence or nature’s demise at Chornobyl, as if nature is a monolithic thing affected by radiation in only one way. Nature is multiple, ecologies are complex, and species, bodies, and metabolic flows are understood differently according to diverse radioecological practices.