At the door of the control room where the world’s worst nuclear disaster began, a Geiger counter showed radiation of 2.33 microsieverts an hour – well under the 100-microsievert total dose the Chernobyl power plant allows visitors.

Then long-serving plant employee Sergei Parikvash, who saw the reactor explode while fishing in the cooling pond on April 26, 1986, held the counter up to a protective lead plate on the hallway floor. The readings began going up: 5.6, 6.2, 6.4, 6.54 …

Tour groups have become an almost daily sight at the Chernobyl power plant following the hit HBO/Sky mini-series this spring. Now the plant will begin letting visitors into the reactor four control room, where much of the harrowing first episode is set, as part of a push to develop tourism.

The Telegraph was the first foreign media to visit this room since it was opened to the public, a few dozen feet away from the reactor that blew up due to a combination of design flaws and human error.

Stepping into the gloom of the control room, the group’s feet stuck slightly to the floor, which is treated with chemicals to keep down dust particles that could otherwise bring radioactive elements into visitors’ lungs.

The wind and rain whipped by at several feet per second as crew members stepped outside for a quick smoke, but the world’s only floating nuclear power plant barely shifted in the choppy waves of the Kola bay.

The length of one-and-a-half football pitches, with its once rusty hull repainted in the white, red and blue of the national flag, the Academic Lomonosov looks the part as the vanguard of Russia’s “nuclearification” of the warming Arctic.

Later this month it will be towed 3,000 miles from the northwestern corner of Russia to the Chukotka region next to Alaska, where it will provide steam heat and eventually electricity to the coastal gold-mining town of Pevek, population 4,000.

The state corporation Rosatom is trumpeting the Academic Lomonosov as the next big step in nuclear energy and a possible solution to electricity needs in Africa and Asia. It’s part of a surge in nuclear vessels along what Russia hopes will be a major new Arctic trade route including icebreakers, warships and even an underwater drone.

“This is like launching the first rocket into space because it’s a pilot project, the first in the world,” Vladimir Irimenko, senior engineer for environmental protection, said before showing journalists the reactor control room.

Airport maintenance worker Ruslan Prikazchikov was coming to the end of a night shift last week when he glanced out the window and saw a polar bear walking down the taxiway, stopping every few feet to look around.

He wasn’t overly concerned. As a lifelong resident of Amderma, a hardscrabble former mining and military town perched on the edge of the Arctic Ocean 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow, Mr Prikazchikov has seen more than a hundred polar bears first-hand. He took a quick video on his phone, yelled out the window so the bear would keep moving and put the kettle on for tea.

“It’s par for the course,” he said. “They were always here. They are the masters here, so we don’t conflict with them, and they don’t show aggression toward us.”

The “tsar of the Arctic” has indeed always been part of life in Amderma. It features in the folktales of indigenous Nenets reindeer herders, and old photographs show Soviet soldiers feeding condensed milk to polar bears well within reach of their razor-sharp two-inch claws. Some residents even admitted to having poached the animals in the hungry 1990s, when a hide was said to fetch $10,000.

But as global warming melts the polar sea ice, these marine hunters are increasingly being forced onto land. The risk of conflict with the humans is rising, who are also arriving in greater numbers as Russia develops oil and gas deposits and expands its military capabilities in the Arctic.

The Siberian village of Oymyakon is regarded as the coldest permanently-inhabited place on earth.

Though it is only a few degrees of latitude further north than Aberdeen, the village of 500 residents is in a mountain valley where cool air pools, isolated from warmer currents by the “Siberian high” pressure system and the Chersky range.

Yet even here, the effects of global warming are already being felt.

There are no walruses tumbling to their deaths like in David Attenborough’s new Our Planet series. (That was in the neighbouring Chukotka region.) But as the permafrost soil thaws in this region, thousands of people have had to move to new housing, forests are burning more often and animals face new predators and diseases.

When I arrived after a bumpy 26-hour journey on the gravel “road of bones” – which is built over the remains of gulag labourers – it was -22C in Oymyakon. Locals described this as “warm” as they took me for a bracing dip at a place where an underground stream prevents the river from freezing.

The next morning it was a more respectable -45C, cold enough to make a cup of hot water freeze instantly when we threw it into the air. Yet it was still far from the record of -68C recorded in the “Pole of Cold” in 1933.