15 Mar 2016
The explosion three decades ago at the Chernobyl nuclear power station - in what is now Ukraine - was the world’s worst civilian nuclear accident. Radioactive particles were blown as far as Scotland and tonnes of uranium and plutonium remain in the damaged reactor core.
The international community tasked the EBRD with managing the funds to help Ukraine overcome the crisis and secure the site.
The first of Chernobyl’s reactors was completed in 1977. By the time all four were powered together, they generated 10% of Ukraine’s electricity. But the design of the RBMK reactor was fatally flawed.
BACK TO TOPIn the early hours of April 26th 1986, a planned test went spectacularly wrong. In the remains of the control room, a Chernobyl worker shows where the button depressed to initiate the test was located.
BACK TO TOPOver 100 times more radiation was released than by Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
31 individuals were killed at the time. Hundreds of thousands of ‘liquidators’ were drafted in to contain the disaster.
BACK TO TOPAn area of 100,000 km2 remains contaminated indefinitely.
Abandoned buildings line the roads into Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone.
BACK TO TOPThe order to evacuate citizens was late in coming. When it did, they were told they’d only be gone for three days. They were never to return.
This is Pripyat, the model town where Chernobyl staff and their families lived.
BACK TO TOPThe faces of forgotten politicians, displayed on banners for a demonstration, lie abandoned and undisturbed in the remains of Pripyat’s theatre.
Empty of humans, the town is now visited by wolves and elk.
BACK TO TOPAt the heart of the work to secure Chernobyl is the New Safe Confinement (NSC), the giant arch which now encloses Reactor 4.
The NSC protects it from the elements, and includes remote control cranes to safely dismantle it and extract remaining fuel.
BACK TO TOPConstructing the NSC was a unique engineering challenge. It’s big enough to enclose Notre Dame, yet also had to be capable of being skidded over Reactor 4.
BACK TO TOPWork continued daily in the ruins of Reactor 4 to prepare the ground for the NSC skidding operation.
More than 40 countries and organisations have contributed to funding work in Chernobyl, and the EBRD is the largest single donor.
BACK TO TOPThe operation to slide the New Safe Confinement – all 32,000 tonnes of it - over Reactor 4 was successfully completed in November 2016
BACK TO TOPThis is the view within the NSC. The hastily built Soviet-era concrete sarcophagus will gradually be dismantled and the fuel removed by state-of-the-art remote-controlled robotic cranes.
BACK TO TOPThe EBRD is also backing the construction of a facility to safely store spent fuel from all of Chernobyl’s reactors.
The first consignment was expected in late 2016.
BACK TO TOPMore than 21,000 fuel assemblies will be dried and cut, inserted into canisters, and stored in modules like these.
It’s a crucial task. The spent fuel will be made safe for at least a century.
BACK TO TOPThe EBRD is guided by the knowledge that securing Chernobyl is a joint effort by the international community and Ukraine.
It is money well spent – for all our safety.
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