Behind the plan for a protective shield over the contaminated Chernobyl nuclear plant is a battle for a slice of the clean-up pie, reports Derek Scally.
The road to Chernobyl is paved with good intentions. Driving along the crumbling road through the flat brown fields of the exclusion zone - the "zone of alienation" in Ukrainian - dozens of cheery roadside posters promise a bright tomorrow. Behind a faded sign for a beautiful blue lake is the lake itself: glittering with an invisible poison, surrounded by rusting cranes.
At the lonely checkpoint, a soldier checks security clearances as Lionel Richie crackles from the radio: "Hello? Is it me you're looking for?" Keeping watch too is a statue of Mary in a flower-bedecked shrine.
A rattling bus pulls up from the other direction and expels four men and two women. They troop into a small brick building where they climb into large turquoise frames and place their hands on side panels. One by one, the machines' mechanical displays swing with a click to a faded green light. The six leave through another door and board the bus once more, which by now has passed through the barrier.
They are the remaining staff members of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, seven years after it was finally decommissioned and 21 years after a thunderous explosion knocked out the front wall and roof of reactor number four, sending flames shooting 100 feet (30.4m) high into the night sky.
On that night in 1986, clouds of radiation- hundreds of times stronger than those caused by the nuclear bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima - were dispersed around the world.
The cause of the disaster was soon clear: a routine test of the reactor's behaviour during a simulated power outage had gone disastrously wrong. But the question of blame - faulty reactor design or operator error - remains as hotly disputed as the final death toll, with estimates varying from 4,000 to more than 100,000.
Some 31 people died almost immediately, reactor employees and firemen who battled the blaze, unaware as their boots fused with the tarmac in the choking heat that their bodies were being blasted with a lethal dose of radiation. More than 200,000 people were evacuated from an area the size of greater London, which is safe for short visits now but will remain contaminated for tens of thousands of years.
Inside the plant, it's easy to spot reactor number four, hulking and silent, its outline as familiar as that of the World Trade Center.The building's concrete outer wall, the so-called sarcophagus, was constructed in panicked haste in the months after the explosion and has been crumbling for years in the extreme Ukrainian temperatures. Today, the structure is supported by scaffolding and yellow girders.
Reactor four is an accident waiting to happen, again. Up to 97 per cent of the reactor's lethal contents are still inside: contaminated inventory and hundreds of tonnes of hardened radioactive lava and fuel that are gradually turning into dust. Just one weak concrete panel could collapse the house of cards and, in a worst-case scenario, release enough radioactive dust for Chernobyl II.
"At the time, the idea was to cover the reactor as quickly as possible, saving as much time and money as possible," says Anatoliy Illichov, head of the international department at Chernobyl, studying a model of the plant. "The Soviet government didn't think at the time of the consequences for lives or for the future."
THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITYhas reacted to this ticking nuclear time bomb with incredible indolence. A decade passed from the first agreement to this week's contract-signing for a "new safe confinement" unit to seal in Chernobyl for 100 years.
The proposed structure, built by French consortium Novarka, is an arch 105 metres high, 150 metres long and 257 metres wide. The provisional design covers the entire reactor and will allow workers to dismantle its nuclear equipment as well as the crumbling sarcophagus.
After containing the facility, the second challenge begins. "Because of the disaster, each piece of equipment inside has surface contamination and, according to our laws, must be treated as radioactive waste," said Illichov.
As yet, no one knows what to do with this waste. The Chernobyl plant still employs several hundred people in decommissioning work, not to mention the dozens of soldiers on watch around every corner. Plant employees laugh at the new shelter's construction timeframe and budget: five to six years and €432 million.
"All going well, this will be completed in 2018 at the earliest, but so much can go wrong," says one.
To minimise danger, the 18,000-tonne steel and concrete dome will be built elsewhere in the plant, then slid in over the entire plant. But that will require tracks and reinforced foundations; excavating the radioactive soil presents unknown risks.
Officials for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which is funding the entire project, admit privately that the timeframe is hopelessly optimistic.
"But we have no alternative and I believe we have sufficient cost controls in place to take all this into account," says one. "The contract is 9,000 pages long."
The new project got off to a bad start this week in Kiev: international visitors were brushed off and excluded from the signing ceremony, which took place in an atmosphere nearly as poisonous as the Chernobyl plant itself.
The source of the bad atmosphere sits in a field on the road into the Chernobyl complex. The concrete shell completed two years ago was supposed to be a new storage facility for the reactor's spent fuel rods. Construction was halted when it was found to be entirely useless for its intended purpose.
The Ukrainian government claimed the consortium in charge knew about its shortcomings, as did the EBRD, but kept on building anyway. Bank officials admit the first consortium was "incompetent".
But now two of the engineering companies involved in building that €93 million white elephant - Vinci and Bouygues of France - are 50/50 partners in the Novarka consortium awarded the contract this week for the new containment facility.
"The two projects are completely separate," says EBRD spokesman Axel Reiderer. "Just because Vinci and Bouygues were involved in the first consortium is no reason to rule out their involvement in the second, which is the best consortium for the job."
Ukrainian officials were so incensed by the bank's preference for the Novarka consortium that it threatened to pull the plug on the project altogether unless the contract went to another bidder, the US Holtec consortium.
The EBRD rejected this demand, saying the Holtec bid was overpriced. Bank officials also make the serious allegation that, when the US consortium heard it was likely to lose the tender, it bought the support of influential Ukrainian officials.
"There are black forces at work in the Ukranian government," says one EBRD official.
The bank told the Ukrainian government to accept Novarka or forget about the money; the extraordinary standoff only ended, allowing contracts to be signed this week, when the bank awarded Holtec the contract to revamp and rebuild the white-elephant fuel rod facility.
CONSIDERING THE RECORDof the French contractors and the poisonous atmosphere between the EBRD and the Ukrainian government, what chance does the confinement unit have of success? The successful members of the consortium and the French government are understandably upbeat. They say they are motivated not just by profit but by prestige: completing this project successfully will make France a world leader in nuclear accident containment and will, they say, weaken the arguments of the anti- nuclear lobby.
"By shutting in the power station we are closing a page so as to open another, one of secure nuclear energy," said French trade minister Herve Novelli at this week's signing.
Critics dismiss these claims, saying the confinement unit does not solve the Chernobyl problem but leaves it festering for future generations. Locking away plutonium for decades will allow it to decay into the even more hazardous element, americium.
"The shelter is not a definitive solution because it does not eliminate the risk of a nuclear chain reaction setting off in the remaining radioactive material," says Frederic Marillier of Greenpeace France.
Some Ukrainian experts agree, pointing out that the state of large sections of the reactor are unknown.
"If nothing is done with the fuel, and the arch is contaminated from the inside, what do we do when it needs to be replaced? Build an even bigger one on top?" said Mykhailo Khodorivsky, an expert who studied the site in the 1990s, to the BBC.
Other experts are concerned that the new plan does not address the problem of Chernobyl's "graveyards", an unknown number of unlined depots of nuclear waste around the plant site. Already some have begun to leak into nearby rivers and it is not known if groundwater has been affected.
Leaving Chernobyl, it's hard to know what is more unsettling: the sleeping concrete monster retreating in the rear-view mirror or the fact that, for a small number of companies, Chernobyl is infinitely more profitable as a nuclear disaster site than it ever was as a power plant.
Considering the millions up for grabs here, it's no wonder the projects are mired in accusations of corruption and incompetence.Like a chronically ill patient, Chernobyl will be kept on an expensive drip, forever, by private industry doctors who will send their astronomical bills to taxpayers around the world. Meanwhile the estimated 100,000 real patients of Chernobyl, with cancers and genetic deformities, live lives of desperate squalor in Ukraine and Belarus.
The road to the new, contained Chernobyl is paved with good intentions. But the remaining employees of the Chernobyl plant, many of whom live in the small towns outside the exclusion zone, seem largely unimpressed by the spin.
"It's not very simple is, it?" says one with a shrug. "Each side tries to use Chernobyl for its own profit."
Shelter from the fallout: the cost
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) manages the Chernobyl Shelter Fund (CSF) of more than 800 million from 30 donor countries, including the Republic of Ireland. In recent years, the bank has already awarded contracts worth more than 350 million to secure the concrete sarcophagus, upgrade plant infrastructure and build new safety facilities and accommodation in anticipation of the next stage of the containment effort.
This stage, costing 1.39 billion in total, will see the construction of a new fuel rod storage facility and the "new safe confinement" shelter to seal in reactor number four for at least 100 years.
The shelter is designed to limit future radiation leaks into the environment, prevent rainwater and groundwater getting into the reactor, and allow the dismantling of the structure.