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30 years after blast, labor to clean Chernobyls nuclear traces
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of San Francisco Chronicle/Associated Press
Posted: April 24th, 2016
http://www.sfgate.com/world/article/30-years-after-blast-lab...
Thirty years after the worlds worst nuclear accident, the Chernobyl power plant is surrounded by both desolation and clangorous activity. Hundreds of workers labor to construct a vast ... structure that is to be the first step in removing the tons of radioactive waste that remain. The $2.3 billion New Safe Confinement project, funded by international donations and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, is a race against time. After the explosion and the fire that spewed a cloud of fallout over much of northern Europe, Soviet workers constructed a so-called sarcophagus over the reactor building ... to keep waste from escaping into the atmosphere. The rush-job construction, completed in just five months, was intended to last only about 30 years and has shown signs of serious deterioration. When the new structure, which resembles a 30-story Quonset hut, is finished, it is to be slowly moved on rails over the sarcophagus and reactor building. After that, robotic machinery inside the structure will begin dismantling the sarcophagus and the destroyed reactor and gather up the wastes to be transported to a nearby storage facility. Under current plans, that process is expected to begin in 2017. [The new structure is] planned to last 100 years. Life of a sort continues in the village of Chernobyl, where workers who maintain and monitor the plant live on a short-term basis, often two weeks on and then two weeks away to minimize their exposure to the fallout that poisoned the soil.
Note: 30 years later and this nuclear reactor is still far from safe. Why are we still using nuclear power? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing nuclear power news articles from reliable major media sources.
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