In the Exclusion Zone (1): The Shelter Object

Iryna, the lady from the Chernobyl International Relations Department piped out,’Please, I remind you, it is strrrrictly forbidden to take photographs of the Shelter Object from the windows of this room’. A number of my colleagues sheepishly turned their cameras towards the Chief Engineer at the site, to whom we were being introduced. ‘At about 01.23 Moscow time’ he told us, ‘on 26th April 1986, a meltdown in reactor no. 4 caused a huge explosion, lifting the roof of the pile, which weighed 3,000 tons, some tens of metres into the air and releasing into the atmosphere massive doses of radiation. At that time forty people were in or near building no. 4. Of one of them, no trace was ever found; it is assumed he was instantly incinerated. Of the others, 38 died in the next days and weeks of radiation poisoning. One alone survived 17 years, dying in 2003’.

‘And what did he die of?’ asked a Syrian journalist. ‘Delayed shock’ suggested the Israeli cameraman on my right, under his breath.

A less fatal delayed shock – plus some unavoidable interim travelling before I have found myself once more in London - leads me to write about my visit to the Chernobyl exclusion zone some five days after I left it.

Two hours drive out of Kyiv takes you to the outer checkpoint of the exclusion zone. Up to there the countryside seems perfectly green and bounteous by Ukrainian standards; as it does on the further side, with the qualification that there, there are no people. A further thirty minutes or so takes you to a broad canal with a perspective of industrial buildings in various states of deconstruction and a few more recent edifices. These are what is left of the four reactors of Chernobyl power plant, plus the buildings being constructed by international programmes to deal with aspects of the long aftermath of the explosion. Most striking is a large block of hunchback appearance with a tall chimney surrounded by scaffolding. This is the Shelter Object.

About the middle of May 1986 work began to enclose building no. 4 in an attempt to contain the radiation which it was still emitting in vast quantities. This enclosure, the result of which is now known as the Shelter Object, or more colloquially the Sarcophagus, took until November 1986. About 90,000 ‘volunteers’ took part in this phase, being exposed, especially in the first weeks, to exceptional doses of radiation, with the consequences which you would expect. It remains unclear exactly what they were told about the risks they were running. In the succeeding months, many hundreds of thousand of people worked at the site either in remedial work or simply in running the other three reactors, which (because Ukraine depended on them for its electricity) were not shut down until 1991 (nos. 1 and 2) and December 2000 (no. 3).

The west wall of no. 4, through which most radiation was coming, was hemmed in by massive blocks of reinforced concrete, which give the Object its lop-sided profile. Other parts of the building were also filled in or closed off by concrete. The design of the Object operations made no allowance for monitoring or fire systems. The consequence is that today almost half of the Object is inaccessible and no-one has any idea what is going on, in detail, inside it. A cutaway model in the exhibition room, where we were meeting the Engineer, gives a best estimate of the present state of affairs. It is known that water is rusting the steel of much of the reinforced concrete, so the building itself may be highly unstable and is at the risk of collapse. The Object remains full of radioactive and contaminated materials, so there is further risk of fire and/or a chain reaction. And it is estimated that the Object contains about four tons of radioactive dust which can leak through remaining air-conditioning structures, necessitating complex dust control procedures.
Now the only staff working at Chernobyl are associated with the international programme to contain and clean up the site. In this process dealing the Shelter Object itself is a major objective. It is to be enclosed yet again in a massive arch structure which should be completed by 2012 at a cost of $1.2bn. ‘Of course’, the Chief Engineer told us, ‘this cost and date are only indicative, since we have no way of finding the exact situation until we begin work.....’ The Arch is designed to have a life of 100 years – the half-life of much of the radioactive materials it will enclose is over 500 years. So we hope over the next century someone will come up with some good ideas.

(Next: Dining out at the Chernobyl site)