Cleaning Up Chernobyl

“We needed some sort of solution that would be able to give us safety and security and decommissioning over a very longer-term period,”

Work forces are now experiencing some of the highest radiation levels in history at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant as they finish construction on a state of the art structure designed to contain the world’s most devastating nuclear disaster.

Following the 1986 fallout, workers scrambled to build a massive structure to attempt to contain the radiation in as little as three months after the initial explosion. Unfortunately, in their panic they basically just slapped it together without any future decontamination in mind, and now after 30 years of being in place, the structure is beginning to collapse!

However, there is now a team that is attempting to seal the old structure with a brand new one that was just completed about a year ago, they named it “New Safe Containment”. They are hoping that this new containment structure will last for at least 100 years.

“We needed some sort of solution that would be able to give us safety and security and decommissioning over a very longer-term period,” says Simon Evans, who is currently the head of the Chernobyl Shelter Fund. “And this is what we have now”

Since the Soviet Union fell, the responsibility of containing this disaster has required support from the international community. However with the new structure in place control of it will soon be given back to the Ukraine.