Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I was ready to leave. Beneath the thunder rumbling outside, I imagined I heard a low
throbbing sound coming from the reactor building. But Julia wasn't quite finished. She was
telling me about the future of the Shelter Object. Because its sheltering will essentially
never be done, it's impossible to dismantle it and replace it with something better. So first
they're going to stabilize the thing, buttressing its buttresses and supporting its supports.
And then—what else?—they're going to build a shelter for the Shelter Object. They call it
the New Safe Confinement.
“New Safe Confinement won't just be a shelter,” Julia intoned. “It will be a technolo-
gical
complex.
” She pointed to some conceptual drawings of the New Safe Confinement;
they showed a tall arc of smooth concrete that soared over the whole mess with the same
geometric élan as the St. Louis Arch. Robotic cranes will hang from its interior, in order
to maintain the Shelter Object as it continues to decay. The New Safe Confinement, if it's
actually built, is intended to last 150 years. The reactor building, though, will be dangerous
for millennia. So maybe there will one day be a shelter for the shelter for the Shelter Ob-
ject, and then a shelter for that, and we will continue down the generations, building—shell
by shell—a nest of giant, radioactive Russian dolls.
Dennis appeared at the door—windswept and wet with rain, but still wearing his
shades—and beckoned for me. Julia walked me out, talking continuously about the lack of
funding for the New Safe Confinement, or even for the preliminary stabilization to keep the
Shelter Object from collapsing in a heap. She emphasized that Ukraine needed internation-
al help for this, perhaps hoping that I would pass the message along to the White House or
the United Nations. Chernobyl was the responsibility of the entire world, she said. Besides,
Ukraine was too broke.
Emerging into the storm, Dennis shouted, “Here you can take a photograph, and let's
go!” Pictures weren't allowed from inside the visitor center, not that I had felt like taking
one. I turned into the wind and snapped a single, rain-spattered photograph of the Shelter
Object before diving into the waiting car. Nikolai floored it.
As quickly as it had begun, the storm faded. The clouds broke as we passed the half-
built forms of Reactors Nos. 5 and 6. The sun came out. A spectral curtain of steam rose
from the road. Laughing at a comment from Nikolai, Dennis pointed to the vapor curling
off the asphalt. “We're joking that now you can see the radiation,” he said.
At Dennis's direction, Nikolai veered left and we catapulted up a gradual slope and onto
a long, deserted bridge that spanned the river. This was the Pripyat River, which runs right
past Pripyat and the Chernobyl reactor, and into which the cooling channel from the nucle-
ar reactor drains. The Pripyat also empties into the Dnieper River, which runs through Kiev
and is the backbone of Ukraine's most important watershed. You might call it the Ukraini-
an Mississippi, except there hasn't been a meltdown in Minneapolis yet.