"Chernobyl: Capping a Catastrophe"

The New York Times has published an extended article, returning to the scene of the "Huge Dirty Bomb" that exploded 28 years ago this week, resulting in 1,000 square miles of radioactively contaminated "Dead Zone" in Ukraine and Belarus. Radioactive fallout "hot spots" extend hundreds, and even thousands, of miles away, into western Russia, Scandinavia, southern Germany, the British Isles, and elsewhere.

The coverage features a video of a former resident returning to Pripyat, formerly home to 45,000, but now a radioactive ghost town since the mass evacuation of late April, 1986.

The article also features large format photos of Chernobyl and its current workforce, focusing on the construction of "The Arch" (see photo, above). The largest movable engineered structure in history, costing $1.5 billion, and counting, this cover is meant to contain the 95% of Chernobyl's exploded and melted core that still resides somewhere within the hastily-built, and now crumbling, concrete and steel "Sarcophagus" of 1986. The Arch must be built some distance from Unit 4, and concrete radiation shielding walls have had to be built, to protect workers from hazardous gamma rays.

The Times reports that the workforce erecting the Arch -- including many Western Europeans -- was forced to evacuate temporarily several weeks ago, in response to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

As Adi Roche, founder of the Irish Chernobyl Children's Project, wrote in her 1996 book Children of Chernobyl: The Human Cost of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster, "the next Chernobyl will be Chernobyl," if the Sarcophagus collapses, sending a large, radioactive dust cloud onto the winds, to fallout on the land and surface waters, and exposing the destroyed reactor core directly to the elements.

The Arch is designed to last only a century, while the radioactive poisons within will remain hazardous for a million years or longer.