Funding woes delay new Chernobyl cover
“There’s no precedent for this anywhere in the world,” Jochen Flasbarth said. “Of course there is uncertainty.”
The German Ministry of the Environment’s senior civil servant was talking about the New Safe Confinement – a new protective cover that is to be built over the stricken reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine: 100 metres high, 165 metres long, built at a safe distance from the still radioactive ruin.
The cover will slide over the reactor on rails. It will be three times as large as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome – if it is finished. But at the moment there is no money – that’s the “uncertainty” Flasbarth was talking about.
There will be a shortfall of 600 million euro by the end of the year.
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