Word: sarcophaguses
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Following the accident, workers tried to curb the amount of escaping radiation by building a 24-story concrete sarcophagus around the structure...
...handling of Chernobyl is hardly reassuring. When workers finished the huge steel-and-concrete shell that entombs the intensely radioactive mass of the shattered No. 4 reactor in late 1986, Soviet officials declared the site safe for at least 30 years. Yet today the sarcophagus is cracked, crumbling and in peril of a disastrous collapse. The melted-down fuel is turning to unstable dust. Contaminated objects are being smuggled out of the poorly guarded 1,092-sq.-mi. exclusion zone. Birds fly into the sarcophagus through holes as big as a garage door; rats breed in the ruin. The structure...
...million residents of Kiev. More than 700 peasants evacuated in 1986 have quietly moved back to their farm plots, where they consume contaminated animals and produce. "They would rather die here than live somewhere else," says Alexander Borovoi, a Russian nuclear physicist in charge of the sarcophagus. Some returned to find their homes pillaged of religious art. Although contaminated with cesium 137 and strontium 90, some of the icons have probably entered the world art market...
...expects to see the end of these nuclear time bombs anytime soon. There are plans afoot to extend the life of some old reactors and to lift a post-Chernobyl moratorium on completing others. Dangerous reactors will be running into the 21st century. The crumbling sarcophagus over Chernobyl's devastated No. 4 may still be there too -- if it has not collapsed by then...
...years. But since it aims to present the deceased as the black Chatterton of Postmodernism -- the "marvellous boy," cut off in his prime by a drug overdose at the age of 27 -- it more resembles a parody of a funeral rite, performed over a slender talent encased in a sarcophagus grossly too large for it. There had to be room in that box for the 1980s as well...