Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

On the other side of it all, attended by several spindly yellow construction cranes, was the Shelter Object. I was struck again by its great size. The interlocking metal walls rose in a colossal vault nearly two hundred feet tall, battleship gray streaked with rust, supported on one side by tall, thin buttresses and on another by the giant, blocky steps of the so-called Cascade Wall. Pipes and bits of scaffolding clung to its battlements, whose flat surfaces were interrupted by a grid of massive metal studs. Catwalks traced the edges of its multiple roofs, and a series of tall, shadowed alcoves notched the top of the north wall, like portals from which giant archers might rain arrows down on the countryside.

I had envisioned this moment differently. Visiting the reactor building, I had assumed, would not be fundamentally different from visiting the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal. But those thoughts vanished under the growing thunderstorm. Instead, I felt an unexpected, visceral repulsion. It was obscene. This thing. A monument to brutality, a madman’s castle under siege from within itself. And it lived. It radiated danger and fear. It had warped the land for miles around, creating its own environment, breathing the Exclusion Zone to life.

There was a visitor center. No gift shop, but there were diagrams and photographs, and an excellent scale model of the Shelter Object. I was met by Julia, a serious woman in her forties who gave me a quick handshake before loosing a torrent of information about the accident and the reactor building. Much of it I already knew, but it took on fresh weight in the aggressive Ukrainian accent of an Exclusion Zone bureaucrat. The visitor center’s picture window gave the lecture additional dramatic punch. Through it we had the world’s best, closest view of the ever-more-menacing Shelter Object, now crowned with forks of lightning. And in case that wasn’t enough, there was an electronic readout above the window that measured our radioactive exposure—138 micros at the moment.

“Sarcophagus took two hundred six days to construct, ” said Julia. “Radiation levels at north side of building after accident reached 2,000 rem per hour.” She waved her hand over the model, a perfect replica, two or three feet tall. “On top of building they reached 3,000 rem per hour. This is appalling level. These are area where firemen were working.” I felt a little sick. Even several hundred rem can be fatal, and the first responders to the Chernobyl accident received many times that for every hour they spent on the building.

Thunder rattled the window. With practiced ease, Julia swung open the hinged front wall of the model to reveal a cross-section of the interior, its wreckage recreated in painstaking detail. With the actual building visible just out the window to the right, the model allowed an intuitive understanding of the gargantuan scale of the reactor—and of the accident that had destroyed it. Flicking my eyes back and forth, it was as if I could see right through the walls of the Shelter Object and into the building’s guts. As Julia continued to reel off facts and figures, she lifted the roof off the turbine hall with the tips of her fingers, a colossal June Cleaver demonstrating how to use an Olympian piece of Tupperware.

The destruction inside was complete. The core’s radiation shield, a two-thousand-ton plug of lead that had been blown into the air by the explosion, had landed on its side, and now hung precariously at the top of the core. The core itself was the size of a small building, a thick bucket standing several stories tall. It felt impossible to understand the power embodied in such a machine. A quarter ounce of nuclear fuel holds nearly as much energy as a ton of coal; the core had held more than a hundred thousand times that much.

Now, though, it was empty. Some of the fuel—nobody knows exactly how much—was ejected in the explosion and subsequent fire. The rest melted through the floor of the reactor, a nuclear lava flow that spilled into the lower floors and basements of the reactor building, where it still sits, unapproachably radioactive. Julia pointed to a photograph on the wall that showed some of the lava, a cracked cylinder with a flaring, globular base. “This is elephant foot. Is most famous portion of nuclear lava, in basement of building.” She turned back to the model and indicated a number of tiny flags planted inside the core and around the building. “These are temperature and radioactivity sensors,” she said. “They have been placed by Chernobyl workers.”

I was incredulous. People had actually gone into the reactor core?

Julia nodded. “Yes. Duty cycle is fifteen minutes.”

The idea of rappelling into the empty core made me dizzy. Julia went on, cataloging the Shelter Object’s many problems. Its walls are riddled with gaps and small cracks; if any of the corroding wreckage inside the building shifts or falls, it may spew plumes of radioactive dust into the air outside. In the meantime, the gaps in the walls have allowed hundreds of gallons of rainwater in, water that has presumably trickled down through the building and created a kind of radioactive tea that may in turn seep into the groundwater.

Perhaps one of the worst parts of the situation, Julia offered brightly, was simply that nobody knew exactly how much nuclear material was inside the building, or just where it was, or what it was up to. Some scientists have even wondered if the trickling rainwater might be leaching impurities out of the solidified nuclear lava, slowly refining it. If this is true, it means that the fuel might one day reach sufficient purity for the chain reaction to start up again on its own, creating an uncontrolled nuclear campfire in the basement of the building. And even if that doesn’t happen, the entire Shelter Object might just fall in on itself anyway. The west wall, supported by parts of the rotting interior structure, had shifted recently, taking its first small step toward a possible collapse.

I was ready to leave. Beneath the thunder rumbling outside, I imagined I heard a low throbbing sound coming from the reactor building. But Julia wasn’t quite finished. She was telling me about the future of the Shelter Object. Because its sheltering will essentially never be done, it’s impossible to dismantle it and replace it with something better. So first they’re going to stabilize the thing, buttressing its buttresses and supporting its supports. And then—what else?—they’re going to build a shelter for the Shelter Object. They call it the New Safe Confinement.

“New Safe Confinement won’t just be a shelter,” Julia intoned. “It will be a technological complex. ” She pointed to some conceptual drawings of the New Safe Confinement; they showed a tall arc of smooth concrete that soared over the whole mess with the same geometric élan as the St. Louis Arch. Robotic cranes will hang from its interior, in order to maintain the Shelter Object as it continues to decay. The New Safe Confinement, if it’s actually built, is intended to last 150 years. The reactor building, though, will be dangerous for millennia. So maybe there will one day be a shelter for the shelter for the Shelter Object, and then a shelter for that, and we will continue down the generations, building—shell by shell—a nest of giant, radioactive Russian dolls.

Dennis appeared at the door—windswept and wet with rain, but still wearing his shades—and beckoned for me. Julia walked me out, talking continuously about the lack of funding for the New Safe Confinement, or even for the preliminary stabilization to keep the Shelter Object from collapsing in a heap. She emphasized that Ukraine needed international help for this, perhaps hoping that I would pass the message along to the White House or the United Nations. Chernobyl was the responsibility of the entire world, she said. Besides, Ukraine was too broke.