For the flick The Abyss James Cameron wanted it to look as authentic as possible, and CGI was still a new thing, so it was decided to shoot underwater. Their were not tanks anywhere big enough to film in, so after some scouting, the crew came across an abandoned nuclear power plant on which construction was never competed. The studio bought up the property and converted it into a movie set, using the outbuildings as the interiors for the Deepcore station, but they also built a 1/8 scale exterior of the Deepcore set inside of the containment building of the reactor! Inside the reactor they were able to pump in 7 million gallons of water, to a depth of 40 feet, and completely submerge the set. After the movie was completed, it was pretty much abandoned. Over time, people have trashed the interiors, but exterior of Deepcore still exists. Check out links to some pictures and more after clicking

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~hakgu/ab-behind2.html

http://www.snydersweb.com/destinations/abyssTrip.html

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/657052 (which is where the above image comes from)

And some more pictures with some background on getting in side and the state of the site.
http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/abyss.html

And the Google maps satellite view.

Several pictures of the sets construction http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Chateau/1734/abyss4.html

It sounds like Deepcore may not exist much longer, recently it was decided to build a nuclear power plant in the area again, and officials are looking at that property as a location.

Wisconsin State Capital in Madison. I know the building quite well and was really surprised on how closely Serenity matches up to it on width and length. The Capital is about twice as high.

Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, home to the University of Wisconsin Badgers Football team. Something tells me the crew of Serenity are not Badger fans…

Miller Park, home of the Milwaukee Brewers. For those days when juggling geese just does not cut it.

Jackson Square in New Orleans. Something tells me the crew could get into a lot of trouble down on Bourbon Street.

Stonehenge

Roald Dahl Plass in Cardiff, Wales. Their are absolutely no secret organizations or hands of blue located under the plaza.

Torrance High School in Torrance, CA, or some of you Joss fans may recognize it as Sunnydale High where Buffy and friends (and and the not so friendly) went to high school.

The Luxor in Las Vegas, NV. The hotel pyramid side length is 600 feet compared to a side length of 755 feet at the Great Pyramid in Giza. The hotel Sphinx is very close in length to the original.

Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex full scale Space Shuttle, booster and fuel tank mock ups. The external tanks could come in very handy if needing to break atmo in a hurry.

USS Intrepid Museum in New York City. The Intrepid was launched in 1943 and saw service until 1974. She’s not as big as the modern supercarriers, 200 feet shorter than the Nimitz class. But still very impressive when on her deck. You can also see the destroyer USS Edson and submarine USS Growler docked at the pier and on her deck many aircraft including an A-12 Blackbird (a Blackbird made a brief appearance in “Trash”), F-14 Tomcat (of Top Gun fame) and AV-8C Harrier which has VTOL (Vertical Take Of and Landing) capability’s just like Serenity.

Statue of Liberty

The Pentagon in Washington DC over the Ground Zero Cafe

The White House

Measurements should all be within a pixel or two of being accurate. The measurements of Serenity come from the QMX Serenity blueprints. Satellite images come from Google Maps. The wire frame model of Serenity is something I had saved long ago, found on a Firefly fan site.

If you want to see how it looks over your own locations, goto Google maps, zoom to the 100 foot level, take a screen shoot and import it into Photoshop or other graphics app. Then download the psd (for Photoshop) or the png (should work for other graphics programs) version of the overlay, unzip, insert the overlay into your image and your done!

(Sorry about some of the images overlapping onto the boarder, I changed the theme to a more narrow one, so a few poke over)

The first site I encountered years ago, Kidd of Speed was one of the first internet sites to show images of the area today. Their is controversy over the some of the details of her story, but her pictures speak for themselves.

Mark Resnicoff visited in June of 2006 brining back many fantastic images that include the control room where the events 20 years early had taken place. In addition to the photo journal, he has also posted approximately 200 other pictures of his trip.

Visiting Chernobyl contains more pictures, including many of the boneyard of vehicles and helicopters that were used at the reactor. Some of those items will not be able to be approached by man until long after they have turned to rust.

3 more shots of the boneyard from overhead, beautiful pictures.

Google Maps has some very high resolution satellite pictures of the area. Some of the more notable places:
The Sarcophagus protecting the remains of reactor 4
Pripyat was the home to nearly 50,000 people, many who worked at Chernobyl, now empty
Devils Wheel, also known as a ferris wheel that was to open June of 1986
Town of Chernobyl once home to over 14,000 people, now 2,000 scientists and maintenance staff for the power plant.
Contaminated ships now abandoned due to the massive amounts of radiation on board

Video footage shoot right after the meltdown

Wiki entry for the disaster