The Arch [part 2]

Hello, my dear friends! I want to talk in more detail about one of the points about which I wrote in the first post.

I have visited this place many times and I want to tell about it more.

Part 1 is here.

After the accident, the work on the plant was stopped because of the dangerous radioactive situation. Nonetheless, as early as October 1986 the first and second reactors were up and running again after radioactive levels on the territory were diminished. Reactor #3 started to work again in December 1987.

On 25 December 1995 Ukraine, the Big Seven, and the European Union concluded a memorandum of understanding, developing a plan for the closure and deactivation of the Chornobyl plant.

The nuclear station stopped electricity production on 15 December 2000.

At the moment, efforts for the decommissioning are under way; this involves the withdrawal of nuclear fuel and its displacement to special storage, conservation and dismantling of reactor systems.

The so-called “Sarcophagus — Shelter”, a construction from concrete and metal, was built around the ruined reactor immediately after the disaster. It took 206 days to construct.

However, with time, the old sarcophagus started to crumble. Built in record time, it was exhausted. A New Safe Confinement was to be built in order to transform the shelter into a multifunctional eco-friendly complex. The New Safe Confinement consists of nineteen different substructures, including the most important one – a protective arch with a special double casing.

Professionals from twenty-seven different countries were part of this new project.

It took seven years to build the arch. 5700 metal elements were used in construction: pipes (starting out from 800 mm in size), 4000 nodal connections, 650 000 bolts, 400 steel and 400 ferrocement piles. Overall the weight of the construction amounts to more than thirty-five thousand tonnes. 1200 people worked on it every day.

The height of the structure is 108 m (the equivalent of a building 30 storeys high), its length is 162 m, the width is 257 m.

The New Safe Confinement will be able to withstand F3 tornadoes on the Fujita scale, which statistically happen once in a million years, a strong (VI) earthquake on the MSK scale which happens once in ten thousand years, and temperature swings within the range of -43°С to +45°С.

The arch was built on the western side of the #4 reactor and then shifted onto special rails.

Today, it’s the biggest movable structure in the world.

The arch took its place over the Shelter on 29 November 2016 and will be put into operation during 2017.