You're reading: SteelGuru: Metal Arch ready to seal Chernobyl reactor

Imagine a metal arch that, at its highest point is taller than the Statue of Liberty. Now picture it sliding along the ground for a distance of about three football fields, making it the biggest movable structure ever built. Under this steel rainbow, engineers are planning to entomb the site of the worst nuclear accident in history, at the Chernobyl power plant in the Ukraine, using robotics to dismantle the ruins and permanently seal the wreckage. After reactor number 4 exploded at the plant on April 26th 1986, sending radioactive dust as far as Japan and the US, the Soviet Union put up a structure of steel and concrete, commonly known as the sarcophagus, over the reactor to contain the radioactivity. Read more.