ENR correspondent Peter Reina took a trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in eastern Ukraine to see the construction of a new enclosure over the destroyed nuclear power plant’s reactor.
Probably the most dangerous element of my 2008 visit to the destroyed Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine was the reckless driver who took me at breakneck speed from Kiev 130km away.
Relieved to arrive unscathed at the site’s security gate, I was greeted by a calm American who guided me around the encouraging complex for the next two days.
At the time, thousands of people worked at the site ensuring its continued safety, but the atmosphere was strangely calm. All the while, the large hull of the reactor building’s temporary shelter loomed as a haunting reminder of the heroic response to the disaster and its terrible aftermath.
Within weeks of the April 1986 explosive destruction of reactor number four, Soviet engineers began work on the building’s enclosed “sarcophagus” and completed it later that year with 400,000 metric tons of concrete and 7,000 metric tons of steel.
Of the 200,000 people who worked at Chernobyl after the accident, 90,000 were in the construction of the shelter, according to the operator. Around 50 later died from radiation exposure. Many thousands more were estimated dead across the region.
He had covered Chernobyl from London almost six years after the disaster when plans for the sarcophagus emerged.
Numerous studies and conferences followed, leading to the 2007 contract with the French-led Novarka joint venture to build a 150m-long steel vault that spans 257m and rises 105m. It was built on one side of the reactor building and slid over the sarcophagus in 2016.
At the time of my visit, Novarka was just starting to settle in and the existing management team took me through the security procedures. Although this involved rigorous technical safeguards, the advice to keep off potentially radioactive grass had the greatest impact.
Learning about the uncertain state of the reactor building and seeing its darkened interiors took up most of the visit. But it was peripheral activities that brought home the scale of the disaster.
Walking alone with my guide in the nearby city of Pripyat, we were confronted by signs of the hasty evacuation of some 40,000 residents. Discarded toys, a rusted Ferris wheel and abandoned preparations for a children’s festival lay among buildings strung with sprawling vegetation.
At the end of the first day of my visit, we all boarded a train for the 55km journey to Slavutych, where the workforce lived. We passed through a large forested exclusion zone, which had become dangerously polluted.
I was told that older people, less concerned about the long-term effects of radiation, were coming back in. And colonies of wolves, boars, and even bears were said to thrive in the human-free zone.
In an optimistic footnote, these Chernobyl wolves are developing resistance to cancer, according to new findings by Cara Love, in Princetown University’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
