KW analyzed the government plans projects for the maintenance of the exclusion zone at the Chornobyl NPP, announced last week.
The most important and crucial stage of the construction of the New Safe Containment (NSC) roofing at the 4th nuclear reactor unit of the Chornobyl NPP will begin at the end of September. The company Kalzip of the German city of the Koblenz won the tender held by the general contractor for the construction of the NSC Novarka Consortium and will be in charge of the works. All of the 26 companies that took part in the tender were audited by Novarka. As a reminder, the Novarka Consortium was founded by French companies Vinci and Bouygues and became the general contractor for the project, construction and commission of the NSC having won an EBRD tender in August 2007.
The technological cycle for the construction of the NSC arch was started on April 26. The shelter is expected to serve for at least 100 years and withstand all natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tornadoes and hail storms. The arch will be assembled 180 meters away from the shelter. Completion of the construction and installation of the roofing is planned for the end of 2015.
After that the arch will be pulled over the shelter with the help of special mechanisms. Kalzip representative Christoph Schmidt said in his interview for Deutsche Welle: “In the future the surface of the arch will be cleaned with special automated equipment that will not require any manual labor”.
Among other interesting plans was that the government is studying the possibility of cultivating fast-growing willow in the exclusion zone for the production of biomass and construction of wind and solar power stations. The problem, however, even if Ukraine finds the financing for such headlong projects, is the same for every Ukrainian region - it takes ages for such investments to pay off, KW article by Iryna Vinchuk concludes.
