World’s biggest lid covers the Chernobyl ruins
A GIANT steel shield, said to be the largest movable land-based structure ever built, will this week be placed over the remains of the devastated reactor at Chernobyl, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster.
Thirty years after an explosion spread radioactive clouds across Europe, the internationally financed à1.5-billion (about R21-billion) shield is designed to prevent radioactive material leaking from the still highly contaminated site for the next century.
The construction of the shield is one of the world’s most ambitious engineering projects to date. Once it is in place early this week, Ukrainian politicians and diplomats from around the world will visit the site to mark the occasion.
“This is the culmination of many years of hard work by Ukraine and the international community,” said Vince Novak, director of nuclear safety at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The bank is the financial administrator of the project, which was funded by about 40 countries.
Work on the shield began in 2012 on a site close to the reactor.
Spanning 257m, with a length of 162m, height of 108m and total weight of 36 000 tons, it is now being slowly pushed into place — in 60cm bursts over a distance of 327m by a skidding system that involves 224 hydraulic jacks. Once it is in place, work will begin on dismantling the shaky Soviet-built sarcophagus built in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.
Placing the arch over the reactor “is the beginning of the end of a 30-year-long fight with the consequences of the 1986 accident”, said Ostap Semerak, Ukraine’s ecology minister.
Two workers were killed after the explosion on April 26 1986. Dozens of firefighters and clean-up workers fell to radiation poisoning. Cancer-related diseases caused by long-term radiation exposure are thought to have claimed scores more victims.
A 3 000km² area around Chernobyl remains unfit for living and farming, although there are now plans to develop the region as a source of clean energy. Semerak said nearly 10 companies were eyeing billion-dollar solar-power projects.
This month, a subsidiary of China’s GCL group confirmed plans with China National Complete Engineering Corporation to begin building a 1GW solar power plant near Chernobyl next year.
“There will be remarkable social benefits and economical ones as we try to renovate the once-damaged area with green and renewable energy,” said Shu Hua, chairman of GCL System Integration Technology.
Such investments will also help Ukraine diversify energy supply. Chernobyl’s last operating reactor was shut down in 1999, but four other nuclear plants and coalburning generators still generate most domestic electricity. Solar power accounts for less than 1% of domestic energy consumed.
Russian natural-gas imports have fallen since Moscow annexed Crimea and fomented a separatist war in breakaway eastern regions. Other plans envision using the region for research and for spent nuclear fuel storage. — © The Financial Times