This is how you contain the worst nuclear disaster in humanity's history. This is the
New Safe Confinement structure, at Reactor 4 at Chernobyl.
In 1986, the nuclear power plant here exploded -- and that is a sentence you never ever want
to hear. The local area was evacuated, and it won't be safe to live in for millennia:
to get here you need special permissions, although it's become a bit easier in recent
years.
In the months after the disaster, a concrete sacrophagus -- it's called the Shelter Object
-- was built around the damaged reactor. It was constructed rapidly and desperately. It
cost a lot of lives, and used a megaton of concrete and metal. It worked, but it won't
hold forever, and it was built on top of the unstable debris of the old reactor.
But over there is its replacement, still under construction. It's the New Safe Confinement,
and it has cost more than one and a half billion US dollars. It is enormous, a steel arch a
hundred metres high. When it's done, it'll be hauled by steel cables on enormous tracks
over the reactor over the course of a week. And once it's there: the sides will be filled
in, and the reactor will be contained again, ready to be decommissioned safely. This is
the world's largest movable structure -- although it's only going to have to move once.
And it's got some pretty astonishing design requirements. It can't let anything leak out.
And it has to withstand everything that Ukraine's weather can possibly throw at it for a hundred
years.
But just think about that. One and a half billion dollars for something that'll last
a hundred years. That's great -- provided in that hundred years, we can find the money,
time and technology to safely dispose of all the radioactive waste that's going to be in
there. Will we do that? Or, once there's not an imminent threat of disaster, will we kick
it down the road for a future generation to deal with?
In a hundred years, when this arch is at the end of its lifespan, will we be dismantling
it and celebrating a job well done? Or will we be spending another huge sum building its replacement?
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