The Chornobyl Arch Shielding The World From Radioactive Ruins: Stories of Chornobyl

For many, this concrete structure became synonymous with word Chornobyl. For 30 years following world’s biggest nuclear power plant disaster, so-called Shelter confinement facility was the only thing separating 90 thousand cubic meters of radioactive waste and 200 tons of nuclear fuel from the outside world.

At the construction of the Shelter above the ravaged reactor in 1986, Anatoliy Nosovskyi supervised radiation safety making sure workers did not exceed the daily irradiation dosage deemed relatively safe. Made of 12-meter cascades of concrete and metal, the structure also known as the Sarcophagus took 6 months to complete.

Now, the view of the Sarcophagus is obscured by Chornobyl New Safe Confinement, or simply The Arch. It has a height of a 35-storey skyscraper and spans one and a half football fields in length. The new confinement took almost 7 years to build, and it wasn’t built above the reactor. Being the largest movable land structure ever built, the 36 thousand ton Arch was moved to cover the old Shelter after its completion.

They let us inside The Arch, where the radiation levels are deemed relatively safe – but only for brief visits. And respirators should be used at all times, even during interviews.

The Sarcophagus has served its purpose. The new facility was designed to save the Sarcofagus object over the reactor for the next 100 years. The 1986 confinement had to be built in a hurry. Its dismantling will begin in 2019 and is expected to take years.

The giant cranes will be operated remotely. Pieces of the dismantled Sarcophagus will be broken up into smaller ones, deactivated and taken to a radioactive waste storage facility.
But for now, final work is still being done on the new confinement: service and access-rooms are being built along with pumping stations and air decontamination facilities.

While dismantling the old Sarcophagus is a challenge in of itself, the end goal is to extract the remains of nuclear fuel out of the destroyed reactor.

The maintenance of The Arch will cost Ukraine 60 million annually. So far, the strategy is approved until 2065. By then the territory of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant should be made as clean and as safe as possible.