The Chernobyl accident is the worst nuclear plant accident in history and the region doesn't look like it would be habitable to humans any time soon. The radioactive materials are still high in the area and the half life of these materials take hundred of years. The soil in the environment remain highly contaminated even after 3 decades that the accident occurred.
It would a long time to repopulate Chernobyl. According to live science, it would take 20,000 years before Chernobyl become habitable to humans.
Typically, it would take about thirty years. However, it is estimated that it will take even longer. The Chernobyl incident was the worst nuclear accident in history. Radioactive cesium is not disappearing from the environment as quickly as predicted.
The time for half the cesium to disperse from the local environment through processes such as migration, weathering, and removal by organisms is also typically 30 years or less, but the amount of cesium in the soil near Chernobyl is not decreasing nearly that fast. Scientists have calculated that what they call cesium’s “ecological half-life”, the time for half the cesium to disappear from the environment is between 180 and 320 years.