Chernobyl shelter safely placed over exploded reactor
Ukraine on Tuesday installed the world’s largest movable metal structure over the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s doomed fourth reactor to ensure the safety of future generations across Europe.
The giant arch’s height of 108 meters made it taller than New York’s Statue of Liberty while its weight of 36,000 tons is three times heavier that the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
The $1.6-billion structure had been edged into place over an existing crumbling dome that the Soviet Union built in haste when disaster struck three decades ago on April 26.
Radioactive fallout from the site of the world’s worst civil nuclear accident spread across three-quarters of Europe and promoted a global rethink about the safety of atomic fuel.
A United Nations estimate in 2005 said around 4,000 people had either been killed or were left dying from cancer and other related disease.
30-year lifespan
Authorities maintain a 30-km-wide exclusion zone around the plant in which only a few dozen elderly people live.
Concerns over the safety of the disintegrating concrete shelter — built by 90,000 people in just 206 days — prompted the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to spearhead a $2.2-billion project to install a new safety dome.
The numerous problems with the Soviet-era solution included the fact that it only had a 30-year lifespan.
Yet its deterioration began much sooner than that.
“Radioactive dust inside the structure is being blown out through the cracks,” said Sergiy Paskevych of Ukraine’s Institute of Nuclear Power Plant Safety Problems.
Paskevych added that the existing structure could crumble under extreme weather.
The new arch should be able to withstand tremors of magnitude-6 — a strength rarely seen in Eastern Europe — and tornadoes that strike the region only once every million years.
Long time coming
Chernobyl’s dangers are real but Kiev complains Europe’s help took a long time coming.
The EBRD found 40 state sponsors to fund a competition in 2007 to choose who should build the massive movable dome.
A French consortium of two companies known as Novarka finished the designs in 2010 and began construction two years later.
The shelter was edged toward the fourth reactor in just under three weeks of delicate work this month that was interrupted by inclement weather and other potential dangers.
It will later be fitted with radiation control equipment as well as air vents and fire protective measures.
That equipment inside the arch is due to start working by the end of 2017.
“And only then will we begin to disassemble the old, unstable structure,” the head of Ukraine’s State Nuclear Regulation Inspections agency Sergiy Bozhko said.
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