In comparison, the Statue of Liberty from the ground to the tip of its torch is about 93 meters high, says Schmieman, who helped lead New Safe Confinement's conceptual design. Now, to safely enclose the ailing sarcophagus, the French consortium Novarka is working on a replacement: the New Safe Confinement, a steel structure 110 meters high at its tallest point, 164 meters wide, spanning across 257 meters and weighing more than 29,000 metric tons. To help keep radioactive matter from leaking, a dust- suppression system inside relies on sprinklers that periodically spray a watery solution to prevent it from becoming airborne. Since then, workers have patched many of these holes, but 100 square meters of gaps remain. These holes allowed water in, resulting in corrosion that is hastening the structure's decline. "There are no welded joints or bolted joints-it wouldn't take much of a seismic event to knock it down."Īt the same time, when the sarcophagus was completed, "there were over 1,000 square meters of openings in the roof where joints didn't match up," Schmieman says. In many ways it was designed "like a house of cards," Schmieman says, with pieces of metal essentially leaning against each other and hooked together. It was erected as quickly as possible to limit worker exposure to radiation, and was never meant to last forever. The sarcophagus, technically known as the Shelter Object, was made of more than 7,000 metric tons of metal and 400,000 cubic meters of concrete. "It was really quite a remarkable feat, but after 25 years, it's in danger of collapse," civil and environmental engineer Eric Schmieman of Battelle Memorial Institute explains in an interview in Kiev. To contain the fallout, the Soviet Union constructed a metal and concrete structure commonly known as the sarcophagus over the wreckage. 4 exploded at Chernobyl in 1986 due to errors in both design and operation it sent plumes of radioactive dust as far away as Japan and the U.S. Under this steel rainbow engineers are planning to entomb the site of the worst nuclear accident in history, the destroyed reactor at the Chernobyl power plant, using robotic cranes to dismantle the ruins and keep its deadly remains from poisoning the rest of the planet.Īfter reactor No. Now picture it sliding a distance of roughly three football fields, making it the largest movable structure ever. CHERNOBYL, Ukraine-Imagine a metal arch taller than the Statue of Liberty.
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