Chernobyl Re-Entombed in Steel

Well, at least in 20 million years we can recycle the place…

Chernobyl is to be laid to rest at last. The radioactive mess at the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident – which last week was named as one of the 10 most polluted places on Earth – will be encased in steel and made safe.

On 26 April 1986, one of the four reactors at the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine exploded. A concrete sarcophagus was hastily built over the wreckage, but it is starting to crumble and has been leaking radioactivity. Now President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine has signed a $505 million deal with the French construction firm Novarka to encase the whole lot in a massive steel vault to halt these leaks.

The arched structure, called the New Safe Confinement (NSC), will be 150 metres long and 105 metres tall – big enough to allow the existing sarcophagus and the wrecked reactor to be dismantled and permanently entombed.

At the signing ceremony on Monday, Yushchenko said: “We will be able to say frankly to the nation and the international community… that there has been a response to the problem of building the NSC at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.”

Source: NewScientist