An abandoned chemical plant in Russia could set off a Chernobyl-style environmental disaster. Take a look inside.

The now-empty plant is located within Usolye-Sibirskoye, a town of more than 80,000 people.

Russia's environmental agency, known as Rosprirodnadzor, monitors actions that may have a negative impact on the environment.

After her tour of the plant, Radionova told the Russian newspaper Izvestia that she had witnessed a "huge, chemically dangerous enterprise" in a "half-destroyed state."

Radionova drew particular attention to mercury residue, which she said needed to be remediated. The chemicals likely hail from an old mercury-electrolysis department that closed in 1998.

Exposure to high levels of mercury has been linked to kidney and nervous system damage. Mercuric chloride, a compound made of mercury and chlorine, has been known to cause tumors in rats and mice.

"No one knows what's there," she told Izvestia. Radionova also said she discovered that oil waste had been pumped into the plant's wells.

The environmental minister for the Irkutsk region, Andrey Kryuchkov, told the Siberian Times that the soil and groundwater around the plant is "impregnated with highly toxic organochlorine pollutants," a group of chlorinate compounds often used as pesticides.

Scientists are still investigating potential links between pesticides and disease in people, but some studies have indicated that high levels of exposure to certain pesticides may raise one's risk of cancers like leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

As of August 1, hundreds of wildfires have burned more than 15,000 square miles of Siberia. Around 62 of those fires are located in the Irkutsk region, which spans nearly 300,000 square miles.

The region has also suffered from spates of severe floods, including a recent one in June that killed 25 people and another last month that prompted the evacuation of more than 1,000 people.

One of the reasons Chernobyl was so disastrous was because smoke from a fire spread radioactive contaminants across a larger swath of land than the area directly impacted by the explosion.

A fire or flood at the Usolyekhimprom plant could have a similar effect.

Read more: 11 strange events that happened after the Chernobyl nuclear-power-plant accident

"This is essentially the territory of an environmental catastrophe," Radionova told Izvestia.

If the wells holding oil waste were to explode, she said, the Angara River could be polluted. That means contaminants could spread across Irkutsk, since the river runs through the region.

Radionova described the plant as a "toxic catastrophe waiting to happen," but Kryuchkov pushed back on her comparison to Chernobyl, arguing that it wasn't scientifically accurate to conflate the two situations.

Both officials agreed, however, that the land should be cleaned up as soon as possible.