Chernobyl arch a feat of humanity

The great steel arch that has been inched into place over the blackened and crumbling “sarcophagus” containing the radioactive carcass of Chernobyl’s reactor No 4 is an extraordinary feat of human ingenuity. Resembling a vast, gleaming hangar, it was designed to withstand extreme temperatures, tornadoes and corrosion for at least a century, and it had to be built far from the toxic reactor and then slid, all 32,000 tonnes of it, into place.

It was also a feat of international co-operation. The $1.5bn in financing, arranged by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, comprised donations from the US, EU and about 30 other nations; the bank itself provided more than $500m. The construction was by a French consortium, and the workers came from many lands. It was a model, in other words, of what humanity can do in the face of a real danger that no one country — certainly not Ukraine, which inherited Chernobyl from the Soviet Union — could manage.

The saga of Chernobyl is well known — the ill-advised test of some safety systems on April 26 1986 that went terribly wrong, turning a reactor into a volcano of deadly radioactivity that reached Poland and Scandinavia; the initial attempts of Soviet authorities to play down the catastrophe, followed by the heroic efforts of firefighters and untold thousands of Soviet workers to throw a concrete and steel casing, called the sarcophagus, over the deadly ruins, a casing that developed cracks almost from the outset. An area the size of Rhode Island around the reactor, including the ghost town of Pripyat, remains off limits to this day.

While nuclear energy remains for now a viable alternative to climate-changing fossil fuels, the Chernobyl arch stands as a dramatic monument to a catastrophe’s consequences. And it speaks, too, to what nations can do in the face of disaster if they join together. /New York, December 2