Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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 build-
ing, 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 react-
or, a nuclear lava flow that spilled into the lower floors and basements of the reactor build-
ing, 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 radioact-
ive 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 it-
self anyway. The west wall, supported by parts of the rotting interior structure, had shifted
recently, taking its first small step toward a possible collapse.
