Containing Disaster: A Physicist visits the New Containment around the Chernobyl Disaster

The Chernobyl disaster is something that even on its 33rd anniversary birthday is still indelibly in the public’s mind and has even had a bit of renaissance with several books published on it, dark tourist tours now being offered and even a TV mini series about it being slated for 2019. The overgrown streets of the abandoned city of Pripyat are empty but for the roaming packs of feral dogs and other wild animals and even though it is miles away you can easily make up the towering concrete sarcophagus that surrounds reactor four, a decaying shield to contain the worst of the disaster and radioactive dust that still remains inside.

As a Physicist I remember this being brought up during our lectures on nuclear physics and was something that I became slightly fascinated by and how such a thing could happen even into my professional life (even spurring me to become a reliability engineer for a short period). At the end of June 2017, I was fortunate enough to be allowed into the Chernobyl Exclusion zone in order to visit the site of the New Safe Confinement that was placed over the old confinement building at the end of 2016. The whole visit was for two days, but to keep the article short I don’t have the space to describe everything I experienced there, such as travelling on the worker train, the stark contrast between radiation levels from pavement to soil in some areas and the heart wrenching feeling of seeing all the strays that charities are only now being able…