00:00Germany says it's planning to allocate 50 million euros to help repair the damaged protective shelter of the Chernobyl nuclear
00:07disaster site.
00:08Environment Minister Karsten Schneider made the announcement during a visit to Kiev on Tuesday.
00:14The steel containment structure over the destroyed reactor was damaged in a drone attack during Russia's full-scale invasion.
00:21Experts say its shielding function can no longer be guaranteed.
00:27Well, our correspondent Nick Connolly travelled with the Environment Minister and joins us now from Kiev.
00:33Welcome, Nick. How close to the reactor were you able to get?
00:41Pretty close indeed. We weren't expecting it.
00:44Maybe you'll be able to bring up some pictures of inside the confinement, that huge metal arch that was put
00:51up in 2016.
00:51It was meant to last for 100 years and has basically been, you know, destroyed or rendered unfunctional within less
01:00than a decade by that Russian drone you mentioned there.
01:02And that thing surrounds the original so-called sarcophagus that was basically put up hastily by Soviet authorities after the
01:08Chernobyl disaster back in 1986.
01:10That is basically reinforced concrete around that reactor number four that exploded back then.
01:16And as you might be able to see in those pictures now, after that drone attack and all the kind
01:21of firefighting work that had to happen afterwards where they made loads of holes in that steel structure to put
01:26out the fires that were actually happening in the structure of the confinement.
01:29There is now water coming in, even after just a couple of minutes of rain, basically you have these kind
01:34of small waterfalls inside the structure, which is all going to lead to corrosion, which is all going to basically
01:39destabilise the sarcophagus and all the kind of things trying to hold all the radiation in and all the still
01:44very, very dangerous substances that are in there and that were meant to be now sealed off for the foreseeable
01:49future.
01:50Right. And was the Environment Minister impressed with what he saw?
01:57It's hard not to be taken by the scale of the structure, but also of the damage from one single
02:03drone, of which the director of the Chernobyl plant told us they have daily, basically, occurrences.
02:09Just last night, two Russian drones came in pretty close to Chernobyl again, and that is just now the new
02:15normal.
02:15I think, you know, this might seem like a routine visit, the 50 million compared to the 500 million it's
02:20going to take to rebuild this confinement might all seem pretty paltry.
02:24But I think it's important to take a step back and just kind of have a kind of think about
02:27how normalised this has all become.
02:30I mean, before this war, you know, who would have thought that the outside world would have got used to,
02:34you know, daily missile flybys past active nuclear power stations here in Ukraine and the rest of the country?
02:39We have the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in the south country, which is under Russian occupation.
02:44That's Europe's biggest nuclear power station. It's constantly losing its outside power supply that needs to cool its reactors.
02:50So there's basically this kind of constant, you know, very real danger of some kind of nuclear incident, either Chernobyl
02:57or one of the active nuclear power plants here in this country.
02:59And somehow the outside world is now just taking that as, you know, a normal situation and hasn't found a
03:06way to put more pressure on to Russia to actually, you know, kind of take that danger away and take
03:11these areas out of the kind of active battlefield.
03:13So is Chernobyl worth repairing while bombs are still falling?
03:22So right now we've got some kind of provisional things happening right now.
03:26If you look at the pictures of that confinement, it looks pretty unspectacular.
03:30It looks like just basically someone has put a patch on there and you would think, OK, that's enough, move
03:35on.
03:36But that is definitely not stable enough. That is already having to be replaced.
03:39The thing that was put there on after Valentine's Day last year when that attack happened, that's going to be
03:44replaced now in the coming year.
03:45And then a proper kind of new confinement will be begun in the next couple of years.
03:50That definitely needs to happen. But certainly there is no guarantee that this won't happen again.
03:55You know, those Shahhead drones that created 15 square meters of damage in that containment, they cost, you know, a
04:02matter of a couple of $10,000, maybe $20,000, $30,000.
04:05If you think about the fact that this containment cost around €2 billion to build, basically a decade in the
04:12making,
04:12it's just kind of pretty, you know, striking to think quite how cheap a weapon makes such a big amount
04:19of damage and creates such a risk.
04:21But there is seemingly no alternative. The Ukrainians are determined to rebuild this now.
04:26But what they really want from the outside world is some kind of pressure on Russia to make sure that
04:30these flybys, these flyovers.
04:32Sometimes there are reports of cruise missiles and of drones flying first over Chernobyl and then over active nuclear power
04:38stations in the rest of the country.
04:39They say this is no accident. This is about trying to scare Ukraine, intimidate Ukraine.
04:44But basically that can only, you know, be stopped by more outside pressure on Russia, maybe some kind of sanctions
04:48against Russia's nuclear business.
04:50And despite that 50 million from Germany, Ukraine is still unhappy with Berlin.
04:55Just explain to us who's upset about what.
05:02It's not just Germany. It is the whole EU.
05:04So we've had round after round of sanctions against Russian energy businesses from gas to oil to coal.
05:11But nuclear is the one thing that has still been exempted from this, largely because a handful of European countries
05:17have ties to Rosatom.
05:19That's the Russian state nuclear monopoly. Hungary, for instance, building a power station there with Russian help.
05:25And they have basically blocked any movement towards sanctions there.
05:30Germany recently allowed a French company to start producing nuclear fuel, not for Germany, because obviously Germany doesn't have nuclear
05:36power stations, with Russian technology.
05:39And Germany hasn't been able to stop that.
05:40They say without EU sanctions, they can't have the legal means to stop it happening.
05:45But obviously, it is a strange look and something that the Ukrainian hosts did remind their German guests about, that
05:50it is a bit strange talking about getting tough with Russia, talking about, you know, minimizing the risks to these
05:56power stations at the same time as this Russian state monopoly that is also in control of the Zaporizhia power
06:02plant that is under Russian occupation, that that company is freely able to do business in Europe and make money.
06:07Thanks, Nick. Nick Connolly in Kiev.
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