Chernobyl Nuclear Accident Congressional Hearings Transcript

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down on the kind of horizontal part of the core, not the near vertical
part. So further reductions by natural processes will be pretty
slow.
The dispersal into the biosphere will continue as migration and
so forth goes unless something is done. This has been given a very
careful look. The actions that need to be done have been identified.
There is a work breakdown structure. That will be discussed
later on. You all have been provided a copy of what are the actions
and what can be done. A lot of this, the vast bulk of it, will done
with Ukrainian resources. But there are some things that will require
resources from places other than the Ukraine. At the front
end of the process, to get things started, a need is the hard currency
that's required to get things going. The work—I'll stick to the
sarcophagus, but these comments apply to pretty much everywhere
else. The work must be done in kind of a logical sequence. First
things first.
For example, if you look at the work that has been done in the
sarcophagus to date, a lot of people went in there under controlled
conditions to get this information that we have. But when you go
to the next step of trying to get that mass of radioactive material
out and contained, people can't do that. A lot of that work is going
to have to be done by remote or robotic equipment. They don't
have that equipment. They don't have the technology to get that
situation under control where people can carry out the rest of the
job.
So what you've got to do is, first, you have to stabilize the situation
so that the dust and radioactive material isn't migrating and
the situation's better under control. Then you need to collect and
encapsulate, place under control, the material that's in the sarcophagus.
This might be something simple like chipping it up, putting
it in barrels, and putting it in a safe, secure condition. And
then third, you have to confine, decontaminate, and clean up the
remaining area. That might be done by more concrete chipping, or
it might be done by something simple like pumping concrete in.
There's a variety of actions that could be used.
At the end, there are a spectrum of options, and there are two
major ones, at each extreme, that I'll just give to scope the problem.
One option I'll call green fielding. When you finish, there's a
nice green field there with a fence around it, and that's what you
see. At the other extreme, you have a big structure over it, in
which a lot of the stuff is still there but is contained, and you now
have a permanent containment structure as opposed to the temporary
confinement structure.
There are other examples that could be used as to where the
U.S. technology can apply to this, and you all have been provided
that information. The identification of what needs to be done I
think has pretty well been identified. I think the technology is
available and we know what to do, and the quicker it's done, the
less the residual risks are. It's pretty much that simple.
Thank you very much.
Senator Graham. Thank you, Mr. Purvis.
Dr. Murray Feshbach, Research Professor of Demography,
Georgetown University.