Is Chernobyl still burning?

Question

i watched a documentary on the Chernobyl disaster and I was wondoring if it was still burning? They also said that they(the UN) were trying to build some sort of cover for it. Is that finished?

Answer 1

they still opperate at that plant,  they built a concret Sarcophagus

around the part that melted down.   they did finish it.   check this city out if your interested

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/chernobyl_poe...

Answer 2

It's not still burning, the many miles surrounding the plant have been irradiated by the radioactive fallout. and that can remain for hundreds of years.

ouch...And people still support nuclear ._.

Answer 3

No, but it is still radioactive.

Answer 4

Chernobyl still haunts, 20 years after that morning, April 26, 1986, when something went wrong in Reactor No. 4 and it exploded, sending a plume of debris and radioactive particles across the Soviet Union and eventually far beyond.

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James Hill for The New York Times

Leonid Drach, 76

Deputy atomic minister

Multimedia



Interactive Feature: First at Chernobyl, Burning Still Some have said that Chernobyl — the human and environmental toll it caused, the obfuscations of the Kremlin it revealed — hastened the end of the Soviet Union itself. Perhaps. It was certainly never the same afterward.

"What they described in newspapers and magazines — it was all rubbish," said Anatoly Rasskazov, the station photographer who was there that day.

"The ruins that I photographed from the ground and the upper part were retouched so it couldn't be seen that there was a ray coming from there, that everything was glowing," he said. "Just a ruin. So as not to get the public up in arms."

Twenty years later, the anniversary has occasioned new debate among those who have studied its consequences and those who have wielded the results as evidence of what a world in urgent search of energy should do with nuclear power.

A committee of United Nations agencies released a study last fall concluding that the effects were not as dire as first feared. It suggested that only 4,000 would, in the end, die from diseases caused by direct exposure to the radiation. Greenpeace, the environmental group, released its own response last week, saying Chernobyl would kill at least 90,000.

The true number may never be known, but the lasting impacts, physical and psychological, are evident in those who came to be known as liquidators. They were the hundreds of thousands of firefighters, pilots, soldiers, scientists and experts sent to contain the damage, to evacuate the citizenry and ultimately to encase the deadly ruin in a concrete sarcophagus whose stability appears precarious.

A photographer for The New York Times sought out 27 of them in Moscow, Kiev and Minsk, photographing them as they recounted their experiences at the time and in the turbulent years that followed. What they described sounded very much like war. At least 47 workers and liquidators died almost immediately. Hundreds, perhaps thousands have died since; the records are unclear. The rest endure as veterans, many as invalids, sickly and unappreciated, if not entirely unrecognized by newly independent countries that wish to put the worst of Soviet history behind them.

"Just like the Germans had come, this enemy had arrived," said Arkady Rokhlin, an engineer, who was 58 at the time and so old enough to remember that war. "And we had to defend ourselves."

And like war, it was disorienting. Fear and heroism mingled with bureaucratic chaos and surrealistic calm. "In a real war shells explode, bullets fly, bodies fall, blood flows," he said. And then he remembered the summer of '86 in the most poisoned place on earth: sun, birds, gardens "bulging with fruit."

"You couldn't possibly have imagined that all this was death."

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Answer 5

It's still considered "hot",especially by that "foot" that melted", and last I heard, they didn't have funding for the cover:

http://library.thinkquest.org/3426/index...

Answer 6

Chernobyl has been "out" for many years.

A cover (called "the sarcophagus") was built over it, but it is now at risk of falling down and spreading radioactive dust.  This would have been so much simpler if the RMBK reactors were just built with proper containments in the first place.

Answer 7

It would be an awful long fire....Can you believe it is 20 years?

here is a site on it by the Int'l Atomic Energy Agency.

http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Focus/Che...

Answer 8

Yes, till the end of time.

Any one who thinks nukes are good, well there is some free land near Chernobyl you could move to, or if you don't want to move from America, 3 Mile Island is for you.  Renewable Energy is the ONLY power plant you would want to live by, and could without it killing you.

Answer 9

to this day they are STILL removing radioactive water out of 3 mile island in Pa.  chernobyl will be hot till the year 11,900 .