SAFETY & SECURITY | CHORNOBYL 40 YEARS ON
property management, and protection of nature reserves. It also includes cultural heritage protection, scientific research, international cooperation, rulemaking, public relations, and even the issuance of commemorative coins and stamps. Completely decommissioning any NPP is an expensive and
Just six months after the explosion at unit 4 a reinforced concrete ‘sarcophagus’ was erected around the reactor. Source: US GAO
in damage to the bearings and the sealing system of the generator, and the release of hydrogen and oil with subsequent ignition. A massive fire caused the turbine hall roof to collapse. The accident burned 180 tonnes of turbine oil and 500 m2 of hydrogen. Many of those involved were convinced that it was a repeat of the accident of 1986. However, personnel radiation exposure did not exceed established control levels. Unit 2 couldn’t withstand the impact of this event and the decision was made to decommission it.
A 25-year timeline A quarter of a century has passed since the plant’s shutdown and 40 years since the accident. By 2016, all spent nuclear fuel had been removed from units 1-3 to a storage facility. The units were no longer considered nuclear installations and were reclassified as radioactive waste management facilities. The nuclear fuel of the destroyed unit 4 (in the form of fuel-containing masses) remains under the sarcophagus and the New Safe Confinement (NSC) which was installed in 2016. It completely encloses the 1986 sarcophagus which had been hurriedly installed in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and was starting to deteriorate. Commissioned in 2019, the NSC is the world’s largest movable land structure standing over 100 metres tall and more than 260 metres long. The project cost over €2bn. These are among the main achievements of the NPP on its
path to full decommissioning. The plant is largely financed by the Ukrainian state budget. Annual expenditures amount to approximately UAH1.5bn (approximately €30m), which is half the budget request for all the planned activities at the plant. The station consequently operates in austerity mode with the largest proportion of its expenses going toward the salaries of its 2200 employees. Part of the work is financed from the International
Chornobyl Cooperation Account administrated by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. This could amount to several million euros per year. The state manages Chornobyl through the State Agency
of Ukraine for Exclusion Zone Management headquartered in Kyiv. Its responsibilities include radiation safety, radiation monitoring of facilities, individual dosimetric monitoring, civil defence, fire safety, work permits, capital construction,
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lengthy undertaking. Decommissioning a plant after a nuclear accident makes this task far more challenging difficult and for RBMK reactors all but impossible. Despite this, Ukraine moves ahead with its own approaches, plans, and tasks. Generally, decommissioning of a nuclear facility is carried out with the goal of achieving full or limited release of the nuclear site from regulatory control. Due to the NPP’s location within the contaminated Exclusion Zone and the presence of the destroyed unit 4, the ultimate goal of decommissioning the Chornobyl NPP is to achieve a condition conventionally defined as a brownfield site. This is the condition of a site where technological systems, equipment, and some auxiliary buildings and structures have been dismantled, and the activity of the main buildings and structures has been reduced to levels of limited release from regulatory control. Complete dismantling of the structures is currently economically impractical due to its location within the most contaminated 10 km Exclusion Zone, as well as the presence of numerous other buildings and structures nearby, for example, the city of Pripyat. This task should be addressed as part of the rehabilitation of the entire Exclusion Zone. Only auxiliary buildings and structures – those no longer needed for decommissioning process or deemed hazardous – will be dismantled as part of the decommissioning programme.
Future activity Within the framework of the national programme, two separate areas of activity at the Chornobyl NPP are being implemented: ‘Decommissioning of the Chornobyl NPP’ and ‘Transformation of the Shelter into an environmentally safe system’. The first area concerns the plant units 1-3. This includes
dismantling and fragmenting equipment and metal structures in the turbine hall, packaging contaminated equipment and materials, and moving them to temporary storage sites, as well as preparing the premises for conservation. The second area, following covering the unit 4 by the NSC, appears to have received significant acceleration. However, the plant’s reports only cover the following activities: safe operation of the NSC-Shelter complex and its scientific and technical support, monitoring of fuel- containing materials, scientific and engineering support for drilling radioecological monitoring wells, development of pre-design documentation for future dismantling and reconstruction of unstable structures. Clearly, actual dismantling at the unit 4 is still a long way off. Spent nuclear fuel handling is a separate area of plant
activity. Currently, the plant has two storage facilities: the old wet storage facility (SNFS-1 – operating since 1986) and the new dry container-type storage facility (SNFS-2 – operating since 2020). The spent fuel is gradually being transferred from the old storage facility to the new one, and approximately 25% of the total accumulated fuel assemblies (more than 21,000) have already been moved. Related to these activities is the ‘Safety and Security’ area – radiation safety, nuclear safety of spent fuel and the NSC/Shelter, physical protection and compliance with IAEA safeguards. The ‘Radioactive Waste Management’ area involves
processing accumulated liquid radioactive waste and ensuring the safe storage of radioactive waste partly derived
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