Twenty-eight years after devastating explosions and fire partially destroyed Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear plant, the first half of a vast safe confinement has been completed. As work continues on the 25,000-tonne steelwork vault—tall enough to cover the Statue of Liberty—the parties to the cleanup are about to agree to a new construction price of around $2 billion, some 40% above the 2010 price.
The "complexities, quantities and unit costs have all been significantly under- estimated," says Vince Novak, director of nuclear safety at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the purse holder for the more than 40 governments funding the work.