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A lot of people don't really
realize the status of Chernobyl
at this point.
It's sort of gated into the
memory banks.
The explosion melt down was
back in 1986.
At that time, the city of Pripyat
had 46,000 people, workers and families
that were working at Chernobyl.
and late April when the explosion
occurred they didn't have
evacuate everybody out right away.
For basically 30 hours the plutonium
fires were burning and they were
actually the floors around there
turned red with dust.
And people were actually sweeping
their porches and their foots...
their steps of this
radioactive dust.
But eventually they were
evacuated and the area became
quite hot for a long period
of time and the status of
Pripyat right now is it's sort of
a ghost town.
The main hotel has birch trees
growing out of the top of it.
The school there is a crumbled
shell with moldy text books and
old toys and wooden blocks still there
as though the people just left.
The legacy of the Russian-Soviet
nuclear program it still echoes
there's actually a lake
in the southern Eural mountains
where they were mining plutonium.
The lake is so toxic, it's one
of the most polluted places on
the planet.
That if you stand for one hour
on the shore of that lake,
one week later you'll be dead
from radiation poisoning.
A lot of the questions I
often times get asked is
what is the status of that
number four reactor, the
reactor that actually blew.
You know, back in the past
they basically just covered
it with a big concrete shell.
It was called a sarcophagus
a rather creepy term for this
the shell. There is still 200 tons of
radioactive plutonium and uranium
still in there. Most of it's
in the form of a solidified
lava, it's a molten fusion of
Uranium rods and concrete.
There's pieces of the actual
reactor still embedded in the
wall of the facility.
And it's beginning to crumble.
Actually water seeps into
the sarcophogus in the lower
levels of the sarcophogus
is actually sort of a
radioactive soup from
rain water seeping through there.
It's a disaster just waiting to
happen. You know a strong wind
could potentially bring that
whole thing down. Now what
they're doing now is an attempt
and this is literally a very
current event, they're just
finishing it up this summer
they're installing it this fall
and it's a new shell they're
going to incase the sarcophogus in.
They call it the shelter or the
ark of life. It's basically a
gigantic steel hangar and by
gigantic I mean it's 37 stories
tall, it's tall enough that the
Statue of Liberty could walk
into it without ever her torch
hitting the top of it.
It's the largest moveable structure
on the planet and they're going to
slide it on these huge rails
over the old sarcophagus.
It's so large, it's so cavernous
on the inside that the engineers
fear actually it might form
clouds and rain
on the inside of this thing.
That's the project that they're
going to attempt to get
and just try to permanently
close and seal that old wound.
[Sound of ancient door opening]