On an icy field at Chernobyl, a clattering Geiger counter betrays the legacy of the world’s worst-ever nuclear accident as the makeshift quarantine for the burned-out reactor slowly decays.
“The shelter was never meant to last this long,” said Oleksandr Skripov, the Ukrainian plant’s on-site manager, his voice muffled by a respirator. Behind him, the sarcophagus, built in haste in 1986 after the explosion in April that year, was trussed up by scaffolding to keep a wall from collapsing.
As Japan tries to avert a meltdown at the Fukushima Dai- Ichi atomic power plant north of Tokyo following the country’s biggest ever earthquake, the threat of radiation has sparked fresh debate about nuclear safety a quarter of a century after the fallout from Chernobyl rained across Europe.
European Union and U.S. officials are still struggling to finance a permanent containment structure over the site as governments, burdened with debt from the global financial crisis, balk at spending taxpayers’ money. Ukraine, which relied on a $15.6 billion bailout last year from the International Monetary Fund, said it can’t afford to foot the bill alone.
“For many years there’s been no talk of the issue of safety in nuclear plants, it’s been entirely economic,” said Walt Patterson, a nuclear safety expert at London-based Chatham House who wrote a book examining the widening industry in 1976. “The electorate is going to be a good deal less willing to invest in nuclear issues.”
Raising Funds
Austria, which has no nuclear facilities, on March 14 called for stress tests on atomic plants, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel the same day called nuclear power a “bridge technology” and suspended a planned extension of running times of nuclear power plants in her country.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the European Commission will hold a fund-raising drive in Kiev on April 20-22 to raise more than 600 million euros ($834 million) to pay for a new sarcophagus from governments. The 110 meter-high arched cover has a 1.55 billion-euro total price tag and the London-based bank so far raised about 1 billion euros.
Decommissioning a nuclear reactor costs roughly the same as building a new one, between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in total, according to Ihor Hramotkin, the director at the Chernobyl plant. He employs 3,473 people at a facility that finally stopped production in December 2000.
‘Mankind’s Mistakes’
“People who come here will see mankind’s mistakes,” Hramotkin said on Feb. 24. “Chernobyl is the site of the biggest accident, the most difficult and serious accident in the history of nuclear energy. But people will also see that people can cope with such an accident successfully.”
Tokyo Electric Power Co., the owner of the Fukushima plant, said today a reactor containment vessel may have been breached at the crippled facility, increasing the risks of radioactive leaks. The company suspected damage after an explosion in the reactor building yesterday. TheInternational Atomic Energy Agency’s Japanese Director General, Yukiya Amano, said he’s trying to obtain more information from Japan.
Radiation outside the flashpoint at Chernobyl was roughly 50 times more than the peak inside Fukushima, based on calculations from detected millisieverts per hour in Japan reported by the IAEA and details of Rontgen equivalent mans, or rems, from the Ukrainian disaster. In the reactor itself at Chernobyl, the level was as much as 1,000 times higher than the blast at Fukushima, according to the data.
Three Mile Island
Levels near the reactor at Chernobyl to this day are currently about 300 times more than normally in the center of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital 150 kilometers (93 miles) away, according to the site’s chief engineer, Andrii Savin.
While two veterans of the Chernobyl disaster headed to Japan to offer help at the earthquake-damaged plant, the incident at Fukushima is more a reminder of the accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, according to Volodymyr Omelchenko, an energy analyst at the Razumkov Center for Political and Economical Studies in Kiev.
“The Chernobyl reactor was not so protected as the Japanese reactors are, it did not have the metal protection,” Omelchenko said. “Also, the explosion was much stronger at Chernobyl than at Fukushima, the system of protection as well as system of cooling were worse at Chernobyl.”
Three Mile Island’s TMI-2 reactor suffered a partial meltdown because of a cooling system malfunction. Nobody was killed or injured as a result. At Chernobyl, at least 31 plant workers and fire-fighters died in the aftermath by July 1986.
Four Reactors
Chernobyl had four reactors and the first started generating power in 1977. The accident was caused by overheating at reactor number four, whose commissioning had been completed in December 1983, according to the EBRD.
The blasts caused the containment roof to cave in and send radioactive debris, including pieces of rods spewing into the air and destroying a nearby forest. After the accident, nuclear power production resumed at the site in October 1986 until a decade ago, the EBRD said.
The legacy is still a drag on the economy in Ukraine.
The Emergency Ministry said on its website that 2.15 million people still live on land with radiation and a 30- kilometer exclusion zone is in force. Detectors at checkpoints isolate visitors who may have picked up excessive radiation.
The country, which was part of the Soviet Union at the time of the accident, will spend 728.9 million hryvnia ($92 million) this year to keep the reactors safe, the ministry said. On top of that, the government paid 2 billion hryvnia out in social benefits in 2009 to victims. At the start of 2010, 110,827 people were registered as disabled because of the accident.
Danger to All
“Every day we make decisions that nobody has ever made before, that nobody ever solved before us,” said Hramotkin. “Everything around here is very dangerous to people’s health, not only for those who live in Ukraine but for Europe and for the whole world. Making it safe is a very expensive undertaking and everything will depend on financing.”
Work to dismantle Chernobyl, pay victims and protect the environment for the next 100 years remains incomplete. Officials say the new sarcophagus, designed by Novarka, a joint venture of units of French companies Vinci SA (DG) and Bouygues SA (EN), will be in place by 2014. As of last month, only the tracks of thick concrete used to move and anchor the arch are visible.
The old reactor four building looms above the frozen countryside, the ventilation stack is shrouded in scaffolding to keep it upright and the adjacent abandoned control room is still covered in dust and debris, its rusted panels gutted of all electronics and devoid of any light source.
‘Burial Ground’
Visitors to the plant during an EBRD-sponsored trip last month were required to wear two dosimeters, special clothing and respirators over their faces.
Outside reactor four, Skripov said bulldozers that are scraping away land to prepare the skids for the shelter uncovered a “burial ground” of excavators, trucks and other contaminated machines that were dumped in holes by rescue crews.
“There were so many places with high radiation,” said Skripov. “Dismantling the current shelter and removing all the waste is still needed. Only then will we be able to say that the problem of Chernobyl will be resolved and will no longer be dangerous to people and the environment.”