You're reading: Chornobyl nuclear wound is covered but not cured

CHORNOBYL ZONE, Ukraine – After the bus entered the exclusion zone through the main military checkpoint of Dytyatky, some 30 kilometers away from the Chornobyl nuclear power plant on Nov. 29, the landscape changed almost immediately.

Instead of little cozy houses that dot the view on the 150-kilometer ride north from Kyiv, empty fields with yellow radiation warning signs and abandoned houses dominate the scenery.

The population was evacuated after the fourth reactor of the plant exploded on April 26, 1986, causing the world’s worst nuclear power disaster and turning this territory into a wasteland. Trees growing through the windows and roofs of many abandoned houses paint an apocalyptic picture.

But on Nov. 29 many dignitaries and journalists returned to the exclusion zone to be present at an event that would give the Chornobyl zone a possibility for revival. The New Safe Confinement, the arched structure that weighs 36,000 tons and is more than a 100 meters high, fully covered the destroyed portion.

“In 1986 I was a student of an engineering school and couldn’t even imagine I would be managing the creation and building of the new sarcophagus, which would make this place safer for humanity, together with 10,000 specialists of more than 30 nationalities,” said Nicolas Caille, the head of the New Safe Confinement project.

The structure was built by Novarka, a joint venture of leading French construction companies Vinci and Bouygues Travaux Publics. In 2000, they won the tender for the new confinement.

The New Safe Confinement Arch total cost is $1.5 billion euros. More than 40 countries, among them Ukraine, France, the United States, Canada and other G7 countries, donated money to a special Chornobyl Shelter Fund, created in 1997. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development was a main manager of the fund budget and also provided more than 500 million euros of its own resources to support the construction.

The arch will protect the unstable reactor for more than 100 years from any kind of natural or human-made disaster and will let the Chornobyl power plant workers begin the process of dismantling the unstable parts of the old sarcophagus, created in 1986. Soon after they will dismantle the reactor itself, Ostap Semerak, Ukraine’s ecology minister, told the Kyiv Post.

“Novarka specialists will work on the New Safe Confinement until November 2017, launching and preparing air delivery systems and other its mechanisms for further exploitation. The responsibility for recycling the nuclear waste lies on the Ukrainian side,” said Semerak, adding that Ukraine hadn’t yet created a detailed recycling plan.

“We have a year to figure out how to do that, with the help of our international partners. Although the arch gave us time, the Ukrainian side wants to dismantle the reactor as soon as it possible,” he added. “In 2018, soon after the whole New Safe Confinement is commissioned, we will start the next stage of the Chornobyl disaster liquidation.”

The ambassadors of 40 donor countries, EBRD President Suma Chakrabarti, Chornobyl Fund Director Hans Blix, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and many others attended the ceremony, sharing their fascination with the giant arch — the 165-meter-long and 110-meter-high steel cover, which weighs more than 36,000 tons was build 300 meters away from the 4th reactor. It is the biggest moving engineering construction ever made and can cover the Statue of Liberty or Eifel Tower.

There are special cranes, located inside the arch, that will dismantle the old shelter.

“I am so proud that engineering minds as well workers from France took part in creating such an ambitious project,” said Isabelle Dumont, the French ambassador to Ukraine.

Poroshenko recalled that in 1986 more than 90,000 liquidators sacrificed their health and even lives to create the first sarcophagus within 260 days to protect Ukraine and the rest of the world.

Within 30 years after that people can safely stand near the reactor thanks to the hard work of other 10,000 men and women, the workers and engineers of the Novarka, Poroshenko said.

About 100 engineers started working on the project in 2007; in 2009- 2010 Novarka team moved to Chornobyl; actual construction began in 2012.

During the ceremony, Caille said that in general the creation of the New Safe Confinement took 25,000 hours of hard work and maximum creativity of Novarka’s staff.

“With no irradiation accident happened during the construction. We strictly fulfilled all the radiation safety rules and provided maximum safety,” said Caille.

The chief electrician of the New Confinement, Vasyl Golovtsyn, has been working in the Chornobyl nuclear power plant since 1996; he joined the Novarka staff in 2010. Golovtsyn said the average working day in Chornobyl lasts 7 hours, 15 minutes, the Ukrainian norm for workers of dangerous professions.

“But when we worked near the reactor, our day was measured by the dose of radiation we’ve got. The norm for a person is 100 rads a day. But near the destroyed reactor, the worker can get such dose in an hour. I can recall only three or four times when my working day lasted only for an hour,” said Golovtsyn.

His colleague, Serhiy Chenara, showed a radiation hazard meter with the 0.004 rads data on it. “We’ve been here for 13 hours already,” he said.

After the blast in 1986, the radiation level near the fourth power unit was more than 10,000 rads.

Chenara and Golovtsyn were happy on Nov. 29, sitting with colleagues from Turkey, France, China and other countries, wearing the same gray jackets with Novarka sign.

Golovtsyn said the team “had no language barrier. There are two official languages – Russian and English. Every worker knows at least one of these languages and the engineers could speak both and even more.” Said Chenara: “We speak mostly during the work using technical and machinery language. And it is universal.”

During his speech on Nov. 29, Poroshenko said that the arch shows the greatness that can be achieved when Ukraine unites with the world.

“We made the place of the most dangerous nuclear catastrophe safer for the environment. Now I hope our cooperation will continue in matters of peace. Before the Russian aggression, we couldn’t imagine anything worse than Chornobyl disaster could have happened to Ukraine,” Poroshenko said.