Every April 25, as night deepens, people gather around an angel that stands atop a stone plinth in the northern Ukrainian town of Chernobyl. This sculpture represents the third angel from the Book of Revelation. According to the Bible, when that trumpet sounded, a great star fell from heaven, the waters became bitter, and many died. This parable has become a symbol for the Chernobyl nuclear disaster , which began at a. Although there were mass evacuations after the accident, the immediate area was never fully emptied of people, and it never could be.
A radioactive catastrophe of this magnitude is too dangerous to be abandoned. To this day, more than 7, people live and work in and around the plant, and a much smaller number have returned to the surrounding villages, despite the risks. Those gathered hold thin beeswax candles that drip into the palms of their hands. They listen to songs and poems performed by some of the survivors, and the air is thick with emotion.
In , seconds before Reactor Number Four exploded, the temperature inside the reactor core reached 4, degrees Celsius; the surface of the sun is 5, It also began a radioactive fire that burned for almost two weeks and shot an enormous plume of radioactive gases and aerosols into the atmosphere that traveled north and west on the wind. Dozens of radioactive substances fell to the earth, often carried down by rainfall.
The fallout included iodine, cesium, and plutonium, none of which occur naturally, and all of which are extremely dangerous for humans and other animals. For iodine, which quickly accumulates in the thyroid gland and causes thyroid cancer, that half life is eight days. For cesium, which persists in the soil and produces gamma rays that have hundreds of thousands of times more energy than rays of sunlight, the half life is about 30 years.
Plutonium, extremely radiotoxic when inhaled, has a half life of 24, years. Though the main pattern of radioactive fallout—which is blotchy and unpredictable—was established soon after the accident, radioactive particles remain on the move to this day, still shifting on the wind and flowing through the water.
While radioactive particles traveled far and wide, the clean-up effort focused on the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, everything within a kilometer mile radius of ground zero. Evacuations of the zone began 36 hours after the accident, the first being the 50, inhabitants of Pripyat, a town just two miles away from the nuclear power plant and built to house its workers and their families. Pripyat, with its apartment buildings, playgrounds, and public monuments, remains a ghost town to this day.
At the foot of the angel statue, there is a large concrete slab in the shape of the Ukrainian portion of the exclusion zone. During the memorial event, it glows orange from the light of many small lanterns.
A long row of signposts stretches away from the angel across a treed boulevard. Each post bears the name of a Ukrainian village that was evacuated, and there are more than of them.
But even as tens of thousands of people were being evacuated from homes to which they would never return, tens of thousands of others were arriving. Most came under orders to work on decontamination, others came for science, and still others defied the orders to stay away and moved back to their villages as soon as possible.
They had an impossible job. Radioactive particles are invisible and have no taste or smell, yet in the hot spots they contaminated everything, from bricks to livestock to the leaves on the ground. These particles cannot be destroyed; all the liquidators could do was inter them or try to seal them up in some way. We have a huge potential for preserving local wild fauna. But even 35 years after the disaster the land is still contaminated by radiation, a third of it by transuranium elements with a half-life of more than 24, years.
The exclusion zone was already a magnet for disaster tourists , but in annual numbers doubled to , after the success of the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. The State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management has set up a number of routes so tourists can visit the region by land, water or air. It has also drawn up a number of regulations to protect visitors, stipulating that people must be covered from head to toe.
They shouldn't eat any food or drink outside, and they should always follow official paths. It's estimated that the radiation dose received over a one-day visit does not exceed 0. Some medical uses might expose a patient to much higher doses. Dokter said a visit to the exclusion zone would not cause any undue harm if visitors paid attention to the rules and took an official tour. Half of this is from the natural radiation that we're always exposed to and the other half comes from standard medical procedures and flights.
The IAEA also has no qualms: "One may certainly visit the Chernobyl area, including even the exclusion zone, which is a kilometer radius surrounding the plant, all of whose reactors are now closed. Although some of the radioactive isotopes released into the atmosphere still linger such as Strontium and Caesium , they are at tolerable exposure levels for limited periods of time," said the organization's website.
Today, Pripyat, the closed city built to serve the nuclear plant and house its employees, is often described as a ghost town, as is the nearby city of Chernobyl. However, neither has been entirely empty since Thousands of people, usually men, have stayed there, often working two-week shifts and ensuring that the crucial infrastructure in both cities continues to function.
After the explosion in reactor No. Special units of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry police the zone. There are also stores and at least two hotels in Chernobyl, which are mainly for business visitors. There are also a number of unofficial inhabitants, including people who used to live in the area and have chosen to return.
They have settled in villages that were evacuated after the disaster. The exact number of people is unknown: when DW asked the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management how many people lived in Chernobyl, the official answer was "nobody. In , about people were thought to be living in the entire exclusion zone. Because they tended to be older, this number may well have fallen. Even though these locals are officially only tolerated, the state does support them in their everyday lives.
Their pensions are delivered once a month, and every two to three months they are supplied with food by a mobile store. Baba Gania left is 86 years old. Some elderly people from the area have moved back home. At least people are estimated to be in Ukraine's Chernobyl exclusion zone today. In neighboring Belarus, the number may be higher. So people just choose to believe the government that it's safe.
Meanwhile, people living in the Exclusion Zone in Belarus get access to free health care and electricity, among other perks, a fact that has encouraged low-income people and other vulnerable communities to move there.
Russian tourists take advantage of the empty space and pristine nature to camp and fish, and sometimes they temporarily occupy an abandoned house as a summer residence. Newsweek magazine delivered to your door Unlimited access to Newsweek.
Unlimited access to Newsweek. Construction of these was halted in but then resumed, and both reactors came online late in , financed by Ukraine rather than international grants as expected on the basis of Chernobyl's closure. See Chernobyl website for details. Chernobyl unit 4 was enclosed in a large concrete shelter which was erected quickly by October to allow continuing operation of the other reactors at the plant. However, the structure is neither strong nor durable.
The international Shelter Implementation Plan in the s involved raising money for remedial work including removal of the fuel-containing materials. Some major work on the shelter was carried out in and About tonnes of highly radioactive material remains deep within it, and this poses an environmental hazard until it is better contained.
The New Safe Confinement NSC structure was completed in , having been built adjacent and then moved into place on rails. It is an arch metres high, metres long and spanning metres, covering both unit 4 and the hastily-built structure. The arch frame is a lattice construction of tubular steel members, equipped with internal cranes. The design and construction contract for this was signed in with the Novarka consortium and preparatory work onsite was completed in Construction started in April The first half, weighing 12, tonnes, was moved metres to a holding area in front of unit 4 in April The second half was completed by the end of and was joined to the first in July Cladding, cranes, and remote handling equipment were fitted in The entire 36, tonne structure was pushed metres into position over the reactor building in November , over two weeks, and the end walls completed.
The NSC is the largest moveable land-based structure ever built. The hermetically sealed building will allow engineers to remotely dismantle the structure that has shielded the remains of the reactor from the weather since the weeks after the accident. It will enable the eventual removal of the fuel-containing materials FCM in the bottom of the reactor building and accommodate their characterization, compaction, and packing for disposal.
This task represents the most important step in eliminating nuclear hazard at the site — and the real start of dismantling. The NSC will facilitate remote handling of these dangerous materials, using as few personnel as possible. During peak construction of the NSC some workers were onsite. At Chernobyl it funds the construction of used fuel and waste storage notably ISF-2, see below and decommissioning units Used fuel from units was stored in each unit's cooling pond, and in an interim spent fuel storage facility pond ISF ISF-1 now holds most of the spent fuel from units , allowing those reactors to be decommissioned under less restrictive licence conditions.
Most of the fuel assemblies were straightforward to handle, but about 50 are damaged and required special handling. In , a contract was signed with Framatome now Areva for construction of the ISF-2 radioactive waste management facility to store 25, used fuel assemblies from units and other operational waste long-term, as well as material from decommissioning units which are the first RBMK units decommissioned anywhere.
However, after a significant part of the dry storage facility had been built, technical deficiencies in the concept emerged in , and the contract was terminated amicably in Construction was completed in January Hot and cold tests took place during , and the facility received an operating licence in April They will then be transported to concrete dry storage vaults in which the fuel containers will be enclosed for up to years.
This facility, treating fuel assemblies per year, is the first of its kind for RBMK fuel. In May , the State Nuclear Regulatory Committee licensed the commissioning of this facility, where solid low- and intermediate-level wastes accumulated from the power plant operations and the decommissioning of reactor blocks 1 to 3 is conditioned.
The wastes are processed in three steps. First, the solid radioactive wastes temporarily stored in bunkers is removed for treatment. In the next step, these wastes, as well as those from decommissioning reactor blocks , are processed into a form suitable for permanent safe disposal. Low- and intermediate-level wastes are separated into combustible, compactable, and non-compactable categories.
These are then subject to incineration, high-force compaction, and cementation respectively. In addition, highly radioactive and long-lived solid waste is sorted out for temporary separate storage. In the third step, the conditioned solid waste materials are transferred to containers suitable for permanent safe storage.
As part of this project, at the end of , Nukem handed over an Engineered Near Surface Disposal Facility for storage of short-lived radioactive waste after prior conditioning. It is 17 km away from the power plant, at the Vektor complex within the km zone. The storage area is designed to hold 55, m 3 of treated waste which will be subject to radiological monitoring for years, by when the radioactivity will have decayed to such an extent that monitoring is no longer required.
Another contract has been let for a Liquid Radioactive Waste Treatment Plant LRTP , to handle some 35, cubic metres of low- and intermediate-level liquid wastes at the site. This will be solidified and eventually buried along with solid wastes on site.
Construction of the plant has been completed and the start of operations was due late in This will not take any Chernobyl fuel, though it will become a part of the common spent nuclear fuel management complex of the state-owned company Chernobyl NPP.
Its remit includes eventual decommissioning of all Ukraine nuclear plants. In January , the Ukraine government announced a four-stage decommissioning plan which incorporated the above waste activities and progresses towards a cleared site. In February a new stage of this was approved for units , involving dismantling some equipment and putting them into safstor condition by Then, to , further equipment will be removed, and by they will be demolished.
See also official website. In the last two decades there has been some resettlement of the areas evacuated in and subsequently. Recently the main resettlement project has been in Belarus. In July , the Belarus government announced that it had decided to settle back thousands of people in the 'contaminated areas' covered by the Chernobyl fallout, from which 24 years ago they and their forbears were hastily relocated. Compared with the list of contaminated areas in , some villages and hamlets had been reclassified with fewer restrictions on resettlement.
The decision by the Belarus Council of Ministers resulted in a new national program over and up to to alleviate the Chernobyl impact and return the areas to normal use with minimal restrictions.
The focus of the project is on the development of economic and industrial potential of the Gomel and Mogilev regions from which , people were relocated.
The main priority is agriculture and forestry, together with attracting qualified people and housing them. Initial infrastructure requirements will mean the refurbishment of gas, potable water and power supplies, while the use of local wood will be banned.
Schools and housing will be provided for specialist workers and their families ahead of wider socio-economic development. Overall, some 21, dwellings are slated for connection to gas networks in the period , while about contaminated or broken down buildings are demolished. Over kilometres of road will be laid, and ten new sewerage works and 15 pumping stations are planned. The cost of the work was put at BYR 6. The feasibility of agriculture will be examined in areas where the presence of caesium and strontium is low, "to acquire new knowledge in the fields of radiobiology and radioecology in order to clarify the principles of safe life in the contaminated territories.
A suite of protective measures was set up to allow a new forestry industry whose products would meet national and international safety standards. In April , specialists in Belarus stressed that it is safe to eat all foods cultivated in the contaminated territories, though intake of some wild food was restricted. Protective measures will be put in place for settlements in the contaminated areas where average radiation dose may exceed 1 mSv per year.
There were also villages with annual average effective doses from the pollution between 0.
0コメント