The ultimate security blanket

YOU can take photos. But stay on the road. Don't step onto the grass.' It is 28 years since the world's 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 reactor's 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 four's remains. This is the New Safe Confinement (NSC; it has yet to attract a nickname). It is in essence,...Continue reading
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