Nuclear safety

The ultimate security blanket

Almost three decades after the catastrophe that wrecked it, a proper tomb for reactor number
four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is nearing completion

Nov 22nd 2014 | CHERNOBYL | From the print edition

YOU can take photos. But stay on the road. Dont step onto the grass. It is 28
years since the worlds worst nuclear accident, at the Chernobyl nuclear power
plant in northern Ukraine, but visitors are still told to be careful. Though much of
the plant (at which, even now, 3,000 people work) has been decontaminated, and
the roads cleaned up, the surrounding forest has hotspots where fragments of
debris and nuclear fuel, ejected by the explosion that destroyed reactor number
four on April 26th 1986, emit dangerous radiation.
At the moment, the reactors remains are sealed in by a concrete and steel
structure known officially as the Shelter Object and colloquially as the
sarcophagus. This has done its job for nearly three decades, but there are doubts
it can manage a fourth. Wind, rain, rust and time have taken their toll, and the
radiation level within it makes maintenance near-impossible. Many fear it may
collapse.
That is why visitors to Chernobyl these days will see a huge and growing building
looming in front of reactor fours remains. This is the New Safe Confinement
(NSC; it has yet to attract a nickname). It is in essence, as the picture shows, a
giant double-skinned stainless-steel Nissen hut, which will have flat walls at each
end. It weighs 30,000 tonnes; is taller, at 110 metres, than the Statue of Liberty;
and is 165 metres long and 260 metres broad. It is being built by Novarka, a
French consortium, and its cost, 1.5 billion, is met by donations from dozens of
countries, administered by the European Bank for Reconstruction and
Development. It was scheduled for completion in 2005, but political foot-dragging
and wrangling over who would pay have delayed its construction by more than a
decade. When it is finished, thoughprobably in 2017it will protect the
sarcophagus from the ravages of the weather and ensure that, even if that older
container does fall down, no radiation will escape. With luck, it will be able to do
this for a century.
Baba Yagas hut
Even now, so long after the explosion, too much radioactivity streams through the
sarcophagus from the reactors ruined core to allow the NSC to be built in situ.
Instead, it is being constructed a few hundred metres away and will be slid into
place on railsmaking it, Novarka reckons, the biggest movable structure ever
built.
That distance, however, is still not enough for complete safety. The construction
site is a compromise, for it is on a slope. The railway must be flat, so every metre
it is extended means removing and disposing of more tonnes of radioactive soil.
Rather than do that, Novarka has built a special concrete radiation shield in front
of the sarcophagus, to provide additional protection for its workers. This, though,
is a compromise too, for the shield is necessarily far shorter than the NSCs arch

will be at full height. To overcome that, the NSC is composed of two sections
each, in turn, made of linked panels, so that they can remain flat, under the
shields protection, until raised by special jacks.
To complicate matter further, reactor four shares a building with reactor three,
which did not blow up and is not covered by the sarcophagus. The NSC will cover
only the reactor-four part of this building. The wall at that end of it thus has a hole
through which the building fits, and which will have to be sealed to the building
by a membrane when everything is in place.
Even when that has happened, however, only half of the contract will have been
fulfilled. The other halfkeeping the thing standing for the century specified in its
blueprintswill be a challenge. Many large steel structures, such as the Forth
Bridge, in Britain, have survived for more than a century. But, as Nicolas Caille,
the projects director at Novarka, points out, these rely on regular repainting to
protect them from the elements.
The ruined reactors radioactivity means it will be impossible to do that for the
NSC. Instead, the plan (besides using stainless rather than normal steel for part
of its construction) is to pump warm, dry air between its inner and outer skins. As
long as this ventilation system can keep the airs relative humidity below 40%, the
non-stainless bolts and beams that hold the structure together should not rust.
For the plan to work, though, the dehumidifiers will have to be kept supplied with
power for the whole period.
Then there is the question of what to do with the radioactive junk inside. The
ultimate goal is to disassemble the sarcophagus and then cut up and dispose of
the remains of the reactor. The NSC is therefore being built with several internal,
remotely operable cranes, and the plan is, one day, to use these and robots to
do the job.
But that will not be easy. The inside of reactor four is a mess of twisted metal,
naked nuclear fuel and lumps of corium, a lava-like substance formed when
reactor fuel melted and mixed with the concrete floor of the reactor building. This
building is so radioactive that anyone walking around in it would accumulate a
lethal dose in minutes. Even robots working there will need to be hardened
against the radiation, and also dexterous enough to navigate through what is,
essentially, a bomb site. Those involved concede that the technology needed to
do this does not yet exist. But once the NSC is in place, there will be plenty of
time to invent it.
There may, though, be little incentive to do so. Once the NSC is finished, and
there is no longer a risk of radiation escaping, the problem of deconstructing the
sagging sarcophagus and clearing out the reactor building will become less
urgent. There are many other calls on the Ukrainian governments money, and
foreign donors may decide they have higher priorities. Doing nothing might even
be sensiblethe 100 years the NSC is designed to last will give time for radiation
levels inside the reactor building to fall, making any eventual clean-up simpler.
When asked about this, Igor Gromotkin, the director of the Chernobyl nuclear
power plant, simply smiled and replied: Its a good point.