By Henry Fountain
Photographers by William Daniels
April 27, 2014
Chernobyl, Ukraine
Against the decaying skyline here, (click here) a one-of-a-kind engineering project is rising near the remains of the world’s worst civilian nuclear disaster.
An army of workers, shielded from radiation by thick concrete slabs, is constructing a huge arch, sheathed in acres of gleaming stainless steel and vast enough to cover the Statue of Liberty. The structure is so otherworldly it looks like it could have been dropped by aliens onto this Soviet-era industrial landscape....
Radiation is like water in that it is fluid and follows no rules in the direction it is taking. Actually, water has more rules than radiation. There needs to be methodology developed to discover the extent the radiation and/or physical deterioration has occurred into Earth. There is no reason in the year 2014 we do not know the 'entire' destruction of this reactor. How big is the circumference? What is the three dimensional picture and the total of the devastation?
