[imagesource: Reuters / Gleb Garanich]

It’s been 35 years since a reactor exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, causing the worst nuclear accident in history.

If this were a horror movie, we would be seeing zombie hands reaching up from the soil right now, and a warning that things are not yet over.

But this is real life and that means there is a very real threat being detected on the Chernobyl site.

Some of the world’s greatest minds continue to deal with every little change from this crisis site, and now Ukrainian scientists have found smouldering nuclear “embers” still buried deep inside.

This has raised some major red flags.

According to Popular Mechanics, scientists have recently realised that “leftover nuclear fission fuel made of uranium has begun reacting again in an “inaccessible room” deep within a damaged area of the shuttered plant”.

There is a massive megastructure called the Chernobyl New Safe Confinement (NSC) that surrounds the area, which uses sensors to monitor the area.

Within the NSC (above), there are other more sealed and zoned-off areas called the Shelter, including the fallen reactor hall where the “embers” are.

This is precisely where the detection of the increased neutron activity occurred.

Inside the reactor hall, everything is a dangerous mess:

“When [the] reactor’s core melted down, uranium fuel rods, their zirconium cladding, graphite control rods, and sand dumped on the core to try to extinguish the fire melted together into lava. It flowed into the reactor hall’s basement rooms and hardened into formations called fuel-containing materials (FCMs), which are laden with about 170 tons of irradiated uranium—95 [per cent] of the original fuel,” reports Richard Stone from Science.

Neuron readings have been detected in the past, too, and scientists believe it has to do with a reaction to some rainwater that manages to seep in sometimes.

The problem this time is that the activity is really deep inside the structure, making it that much more difficult to do anything about it.

Luckily, the Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP) scientists say the growth in neutron activity is low enough that they still have a few years to figure out their next steps and keep the rain out.

Because the site is far too poisonous for humans, they might build a robot that can walk around and spray neutron-stanching chemicals on the affected areas.

Don’t worry, though, this is not the beginning of another Chernobyl disaster, as there isn’t enough viable material or surrounding collateral for that kind of threat or damage.

The main thing at risk seems to be the “rickety” 34-year-old Shelter.

Without this structure, and the sensors used to keep an eye on the area, things could then become more tricky.

[source:popularmechanics]