The world’s largest moveable structure, constructed over the last six years at
a cost of over one and a half billion (American) dollars, is now sitting still
— you can watch its final movements here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7aMcKinrWY
The (so-called) New Safe Containment at Chernobyl in the Ukraine was slid into
place (a rather laconic expression for the engineering feat whose last
movements are chronicled in the video linked above) over the ‘sarcophagus’
which has seriously deteriorated since its hasty construction in 1986.
The New Safe Containment is designed to confine the solid radioactive waste at
the site for the next 100 years. (It is estimated that 95% of the original
radioactive inventory of reactor unit 4 still remains inside the ruins of the
reactor building.)
According to LIVE SCIENCE, because of the long-lived radiation in the region
surrounding the former Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the area won't be safe
for human habitation for at least 20,000 years.
http://www.livescience.com/39961-chernobyl.html
Determining just what measures will be undertaken to contain, reduce or
eliminate the hazards arising from the Chernobyl ‘incident' for the remaining
19,900 of those 20,000 years is left as an exercise for the reader.
(As an aid in that exercise, consider that if we look BACKWARD the same length
of time [199 centuries] we see that the creation of clay pottery was the
‘dernier cri’ — and the use of raw metals was still ‘Zukunftsmusik’ [a rather
lovely German figurative expression for ‘dreams of the future’. I’m sure those
early potters and the subsequent primitive metallurgists, to say nothing of the
father of modern science whose famous quotation I have usurped in my subject
heading, never imagined anything like THIS in their wildest dreams — or
nightmares ...].)
Chris Bruce,
in Kiel Germany
(which lies approximately 1,600 kilometres [about 1,000 miles]
NNE of Chernobyl; and whose residents were advised for some
time not to go out in the rain when the wind was blowing from
that direction, in the aftermath of the events of April 26, 1986.
Inhabitants in southeast Germany are still warned not to gather
wild mushrooms, as they, along with the wild boars which consume
them, continue to be contaminated with significant levels of Cesium-137.)
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