"Come inside: this is Apartment No. 3, we lived here until 1986," she says, as memories stir up from when she was 18, the last time she was in the building.

Now 50, Shevchuk's world was ripped apart on April 26, 1986, when a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded in then-Soviet Ukraine, spewing a cloud of radioactive material across several European countries.

All the inhabitants of Pripyat, a town of nearly 50,000 built just two kilometres from the plant to house its employees, were evacuated the day after the world's worst nuclear disaster.

Shevchuk's parents and her sister were among those who fled, while she happened to be staying in Kiev at the time.