The ultimate security blanket
Almost three decades after the catastrophe that wrecked it, a proper tomb for reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is nearing completion
“YOU can take photos. But stay on the road. Don’t step onto the grass.” It is 28 years since the world’s worst nuclear accident, at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, but visitors are still told to be careful. Though much of the plant (at which, even now, 3,000 people work) has been decontaminated, and the roads cleaned up, the surrounding forest has hotspots where fragments of debris and nuclear fuel, ejected by the explosion that destroyed reactor number four on April 26th 1986, emit dangerous radiation.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “The ultimate security blanket”
From the November 22nd 2014 edition
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