Massive Steel Enclosure Around Chernobyl Aims to Keep Radioactive Chemicals Sealed For 100 Years

Security guards are surrounding the Chernobyl in Ukraine at only 19 miles away from the site, scanning departing vehicles for signs of radiation. However, past the derelict villages and collective farms, a new skyline has emerged from the nuclear plant.

New sarcophagus of #Chernobyl power plant is almost ready to be slid over still very radioactive remnants of Block 4 pic.twitter.com/iz4FDfhyjr

— Petr Shelomovskiy (@shelomovskiy) April 24, 2016

Around 2,500 people are currently finishing a massive steel enclosure that they hope will finally cover Chernobyl's reactor 4, where radioactive materials of the nuclear plant are encased hastily after the disaster. If all goes according to plan, a structure in the form of an arch more than 500 feet long and 350 feet high will be put into place by next year, and is hopefully enough to contain the radioactive substances that kept the place a danger for humans. The massive leak-tight barrier is designed to hold for at least the next 100 years.

The Chernobyl Disaster, which occurred on April 26, 1986, killed 31 people immediately, and left parts of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia contaminated with toxic radioactive materials. Pripyat, the town where the power plant was located, was completely evacuated of its 50,000 human population. The exclusion zone still remains around the plant, keeping it off limits to everyone except its authorized workers, most of whom live just outside the said danger zone.

The New Safe Confinement - the name which the project is called - will take two to three days to slide into place, as it is large enough to cover a dozen football fields. According to the Wall Street Journal, the project costs about $2.45 billion dollars and is being funded by international donors as well as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. However, despite the massive budget, the Chernobyl cleanup is still facing a shortfall to the tune of $ 112 million to finish a storage facility for the nuclear fuel from the three other reactors, all of which are now offline.