At 2 p.m. on Feb. 12, part of the roof and the wall of the Chornobyl nuclear plant collapsed, Ukraine's emergencies services announced. The accident took down about 600 square meters of a covering adjacent to the ill-famed fourth unit. Emergencies services said radiation levels did not increase after the accident.
Ukrainian officials said the preliminary cause for the collapse was heavy snowfall. Meanwhile, the plant’s administration gave
itself two weeks to investigate the accident.
According to Chornobyl’s spokeswoman Maya
Rudenko, normally snow is cleaned from the plant’s roof. However, she wouldn’t
say if the snow was properly removed in the days before the accident, but noted
that there were constant snowfalls and rain in recent days.
The collapsed area was in a machinery hall, part of plant’s fourth
unit, the one that exploded in 1986, spewing radiation over a large
part of Europe. According to Rudenko, the collapsed area is over 50
meters away from exact place of explosion. The damaged building was part of a protective
construction built after the catastrophe. While the sarcophagus covers the
reactor itself, other protective structures are built around the entire unit.
“We knew that there was a risk of
collapsing of the old constructions,” Rudenko told Kyiv Post.
According to her, plans to dismantle the
old structures are still at the discussion stage. She added that the last
survey of their condition took place in 2011, and that so far there is no plan
to inspect them again because of the accident.
Russian nuclear expert Sergey Vakulovsky,
who spent three years in Chornobyl examining the aftermath of catastrophe, says
there is hardly a risk of radiation pollution for Ukraine, even if more of
Chornobyl’s old buildings collapsed.
“It may cause problems for people working
there, but there is hardly a chance that it will affect anyone outside of the
30 kilometers exclusion zone,” Vakulovsky said.
According to Rudenko, the accident didn’t
affect the workers building new a shelter for the reactor, and they are proceeding
with the construction. Around 6,000 people work in the exclusion zone in shifts, mostly in construction and security.
At the same time, Agence France Presse reported that 80 workers were evacuated from the site.
Ukraine’s parliamentary committee for
nuclear safety was scheduled to conduct their annual working visit to Chornobyl
on Feb. 13. The trip wasn’t cancelled due to the accident, and a
delegation of about 50 people went to see the plant.
“That trip is obviously a proof that there
is no danger caused by the accident,” Vasyl Svitlychniy from committee’s
administration assured.
Yet Russia’s chapter of international environmental organization Greenpeace voiced its concerns.
“Even if the radiation level didn’t rise,
the accident is still a worrying signal,” Vladymyr Chuprov, coordinator of
energy program in Greenpeace Russia told Interfax news agency. “If walls in the
machinery hall crashed, there is no guarantee that the sarcophagus, built
(earlier) in 1986, won’t start breaking down soon.”
The constructing of the new shelter that
will cover Chornobyl’s fourth unit is scheduled for completion for 2015. The
collapsed area will be covered by it, too.
Kyiv Post staff
writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected]
