"The place" in line 1 refers to :

For nearly 50 years, the place officially didn't exist - but it has left a very real heritage. The USSR's Kazakhstan bomb test site and nearby town of Kurchatov have an incidence of cancer 70 per cent higher than the national average, which is already higher than in the West. Nearly 500 nuclear explosions took place at the site - but only when the wind was blowing north to carry the radioactive debris away from the city where thousands of scientists and staff lived. The farmers of Kazakhstan's plains and mountains were on the receiving end of the, deadly fall out.
The explosive power of the Kazakhstan nuclear tests was more than 2.500 times that of the bomb that flattened Hiroshima. The local population now live in a lonely, contaminated landscape; The result is a plague of cancers and birth defects.
Giving in to intense pressure, Boris Yeltsin closed the test site in 1991. Kurchatov is now a ghost town, populated by the shadows of the victims.