http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=585&ncid=585&e=2&u=/nm/20030422/sc_nm/nuclear_chernobyl_dc_5
Caption:
The concrete shield
thrown up to block radiation escaping
the Chernobyl nuclear power station after it exploded in 1986
is collapsing and needs urgent reinforcement, Russia's atomic
energy minister said April 22, 2003. A radiation level check
is shown being taken outside the concrete sarcophagus housing
the nuclear power plant's fourth reactor, April 21, 2001.
(Gleb Garanich/Reuters)
Russian Minister Fears Collapse of Chernobyl
Shield
Tue Apr 22, 2003, 11:04 AM ET
By Oliver Bullough
MOSCOW (Reuters) -
The concrete shield thrown up to block radiation
escaping the Chernobyl nuclear power station after it exploded
in 1986
is collapsing and needs urgent reinforcement, Russia's atomic
energy
minister said Tuesday.
Alexander Rumyantsev
was speaking at a news conference almost exactly
17 years after one of Chernobyl's four reactors exploded and spewed
clouds of radioactivity over much of Europe in the world's worst
civilian nuclear disaster.
"We can see a
situation where the roof could fall in, or rather
the supports that hold up the roof could fall down," he said,
adding that the concrete itself was leaking radiation.
"There are a lot
of holes in the sarcophagus," he said.
He said workers from
his ministry involved in monitoring
the reactor in ex-Soviet Ukraine kept him informed.
"I know how the
sarcophagus was built. It was built in difficult
radioactive conditions for the builders. They had to work fast
to get away from the danger," he said.
"We need to surround
it with another sarcophagus."
The Chernobyl disaster
killed about 30 firefighters in the
immediate aftermath, and many of the people involved in the
clean-up died in the next weeks.
Rumyantsev said a collapse
of the Soviet-era sarcophagus,
dramatic as it may be, would have much more limited consequences
than the original disaster.
"There is a strong
chance it could happen, but it would not be
such a catastrophe, it would be more of a local affair,"
he said.
"It would be bad for Ukraine."
Rumyantsev, a staunch
believer in the future of nuclear energy,
said that despite the shock experienced by the public in 1986,
estimates of the number of victims were often exaggerated.
Environmentalists and
doctors in Ukraine say there have been
thousands of deaths from radiation-related illnesses and a huge
increase in thyroid cancer following the accident.
"Say there were
200 deaths ... an accident in a chemical factory
would be more horrible judging by the number of victims. It was
about as deadly as a plane crash -- Concorde, say," Rumyantsev
said, referring to a supersonic jet which crashed in Paris nearly
three years ago.
"When Greenpeace
or other ecologists talk about a million victims,
I am prepared to agree that a million people were scared. That
was
the main medical result of the disaster."
