A robot guided by software used by America’s space agency last year to map the surface of Mars will soon plunge into an even more hostile environment – the crumbling, radioactive tomb enclosing the melted core of Chernobyl’s damaged reactor.
The Pioneer, a $2.7 million U.S. robot built by the firm RedZone Robotics and fitted with cameras, sensors and navigation equipment designed by National Space and Aeronautic Administration and the Department of Energy, will probe the makeshift, crack-lined sarcophagus hastily erected 12 years ago over the severely damaged nuclear reactor.
The hope is that the machine will replace workers who now risk their lives by dashing inside the facility for seconds at a time to photograph its interior.
‘This system is basically a diagnostic tool that will go into places where human beings cannot go or can only go for very short periods of time for safety reasons,’ said Craig Smith, an engineer with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a Department of Energy lab that helped design the device.
The tomb surrounding remnants of Chernobyl’s Reactor No. 4 contains nearly 200 tons of nuclear fuel and up to 90 percent of the radiation released by the 1986 explosion. In January, Chernobyl officials warned that the structure could collapse, releasing 34 tons of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. Earlier this month, Britain’s Independent newspaper cited a study suggesting that radioactive elements from the sarcophagus may have penetrated Ukraine’s water supply.
Ukraine has put the cost of repairing the structure at $760 million, and industrialized nations have so far pledged $337 million toward that goal. But information on the tomb’s condition remains sketchy.
Pioneer should help rectify that by collecting and testing samples of the reactor’s concrete shielding while at the same time recording images using an updated version of the virtual-reality mapping software first tried by NASA during its Mars Pathfinder mission last year. Scientists will then use the data to develop a three-dimensional model of the sarcophagus interior and the damaged reactor core within. The information also will be used to model the effects of the tomb’s collapse. Last month, a Pioneer prototype was successfully linked to a Silicone Graphics Octane workstation. The next stage is to plug it into an Onyx-2 supercomputer that will perform the heavy number-crunching required.
The Ukrainian response to the project has thus far been lukewarm.
Artur Korneev, deputy chief for operations at the sarcophagus, told the Post Ukraine ‘does not really need’ the Pioneer robot urgently, adding that the undertaking was more useful to U.S. scientists eager to test their latest technical designed RBMK reactor exploded in the early hours of April 26, 1986, spreading a poisonous radioactive cloud from its location 140 kilometers north of Kyiv across Europe, with tragic environmental and human consequences. The disaster was first hushed up by the Soviet authorities. But a few days later, in the first major test for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of ‘glasnost’, or ‘openness’, hundreds of thousands of people in Ukraine and neighboring Belarus were moved from land contaminated by the disaster.
Twelve years on, radiation continues to poison the land. ‘For this period the frequency of diseases has grown 3.9 times,’ the Health Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Vladimir Kholosha, the deputy emergency situations minister, said the Chernobyl disaster had cost Ukraine over $120 billion in economic damages since 1986, from lost crops to lost power.
According to the Health Ministry, the death rate in 1997 among those who remained in contaminated zones was 18 percent higher than the national average.
Radiation has increased the incidence of diseases affecting the respiratory, nervous and digestive systems, with children the worst hit – thyroid cancers among children are 10 times the 1986 level.
‘From 1981 to 1985, there were about five cases of thyroid cancer among children each year,’ said Valery Tereshenko, a doctor and an official spokesman for Chernobyl issues. ‘Now we have 50 each year,’ he said, adding the incidence of thyroid cancers was only likely to decrease after 2001-5.
Kholosha told the news conference on Wednesday he had only $7.5 million to spend on hospitals and medicines in the affected area, with even this paltry sum under threat from a cash-strapped government desperate for funds to pay wage and pension debts.
The total number of deaths from the disaster is estimated by the Health Ministry at 3,576, with 797 of them emergency workers sent in to clean up the contaminated area. Chernobyl is supposed to close in 2000.
But earlier this month Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma threatened to keep it running after 2000 if Western nations fail to stump up $1.6 billion dollars in loans needed to complete two new nuclear power plants in the west of the country.
Ukraine says it needs the two new plants, both 85 percent complete, to replace Chernobyl’s generating capacity. The plant’s third reactor is due to go back into operation next month.
