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Science Chernobyl to be sealed in Giant Steel Coffin
Science Chernobyl to be sealed in Giant Steel Coffin | Chernobyl to be sealed in Giant Steel Coffin |
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| by William Atkins | |
| Tuesday, 29 April 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 2 According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is headquartered in Vienna, Austria, only the Chernobyl disaster attained its highest level—Level 7—on its International Nuclear Event Scale (pdf file), what is considered a “Major Accident: Maximum Credible Accident,” or an event that causes a severe nuclear meltdown. At 1:23:40 a.m. local time (Coordinated Universal Time plus three hours [UTC+3]), the number four nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union (near Pripyat in the northern section of the Ukraine) exploded. The plant was named after the city of Chernobyl, which was located about eighteen kilometers northwest of the nuclear power planet site. Afterwards, the explosion, which sent up a huge mushroom-shaped cloud of radioactive materials into the atmosphere, was considered thirty to forty times more deadly that the fallout from the atomic bomb dropped by the United States onto Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II (1939-45). Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to resettle because of the nuclear disaster. The deadly fallout spread over parts of western Soviet Union, along with parts of Western, Eastern, and Northern Europe. It even made it to the eastern seacoast of the United States. Radiation experts estimated that sixty percent of its deadly contents fell on the former U.S.S.R. satellite country of Belarus, along with also dropping large amounts on the Ukraine and Russia. These areas within the three countries were directly contaminated, an area half the size of the country of Italy. More information about the old structure and the New Safe Confinement structure follows on the next page. |
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