A 2 $billion stop gap measure- Chernobyl’s new tomb

Chernobyl’s Steel Radiation Shield Is the Biggest Moving Structure Ever, Gizmodo Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan 29 April 14 (Terrific photos) In the normal world, it’s what you’d call a bad investment: Spending $2 billion to build the largest moveable structure ever—and knowing that it won’t work for longer than 100 years. But in Chernobyl, it’s the best available option for protecting a whole continent from the worst nuclear disaster in history.

Today is the 28th anniversary of the disaster, which killed 31 and subjects hundreds of others to extreme suffering, and left 200 tons of radioactive corium and 16 tons of uranium and plutonium exposed inside the smoking remains of Reactor 4. At the time, heroic workers quickly constructed an ad hoc shelter over the reactor to stop the spew of radioactive material across Ukraine and Western Europe, using 7,000 metric tons of metal and many more tons of concrete. But that shelter—known as the Sarcophagus—was never meant to last. And now, it’s in danger of collapsing.

Enter New Safe Confinement, a project that’s nearly as old as the meltdown it’s designed to contain. It’s a two-pronged plan: First, thousands of workers are constructing a 300-foot-tall steel arch that weighs more than 32,000-tons. Though it’s being built a few hundred meters away from Reactor 4, it’s eventually going to cover it, creating a thick steel cage around the reactor in case it collapses.

But because the area near it is too radioactive for workers to stay there for longer than a few minutes, this huge structure is being built next door—then, very very slowly, it will be slid on teflon-coated tracks to cover the

April 29, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Belarus, Reference, safety

5 Comments »

Reblogged this on jkmhoffman.

Comment by jkmhoffman2014 | April 29, 2014 | Reply
russia must take step to clean up site of chernobyl as @% years over and site must be radiation free ,all measyres must be taken

Comment by pramod deshpande,atomic energy india,2014 APR 29 | April 29, 2014 | Reply
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Pingback by Anonymous | April 29, 2014 | Reply
power too cheap to meter
ROFL

Comment by kmcloren | April 29, 2014 | Reply
Unless world leaders and the scientific community end sixty-nine years (2014 – 1945 = 69 yrs) of misinformation on the basic nature of nuclear forces [1], society cannot safely harvest “powers beyond the dreams of scientific fiction” that Aston reported in the last paragraph of his 1922 Nobel Prize Lecture [2].

1. Oliver K. Manuel, See references to neutron repulsion and nine pages of precise experimental data (pages 19-27) that were ignored after 1945 in an effort to hide the source of energy that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in “A Journey to the Core of the Sun – Chapter 2: Acceptance of Reality“: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Chapter_2.pdf

2. Francis William Aston, “Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dreams of scientific fiction; but the remote possibility must always be considered that the energy, once liberated will be completely uncontrollable and by its intense violence detonate all neighbouring substances. In this event, the whole of the hydrogen on the earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.” in “Mass spectra and isotopes,” Nobel Lecture,” (12 December 1922): http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1922/aston-lecture.pdf

Comment by omanuel | May 2, 2014 | Reply