Turkey's Okyanus Group construction firm won a 1.6 billon euro tender to construct rust-resistant steel panels for inside and outside of the cover of Ukraine’s former Chernobyl nuclear plant, the site of a 1986 nuclear disaster, Hurriyet daily news reported on Thursday.
The project stipulates making a giant cover or vault to close off the plant’s number four reactor, so that radioactive particles do not mix with the atmosphere, Okyanus Group CEO Osman Guney told the news portal.
Okyanus plans to build the steel panels, which will be designed to last 100 years and withstand 170km/h winds, at a separate location and the placed over the reactor. The project is scheduled to be completed in 2016.
"In this project our firm’s expertise is with rust-resistant steel panels, which will be used on the inside and outside of the cover. What gave us an edge in the tender was not so much our price, but our technical capabilities," Guney also said.
The destroyed reactor was covered by a concrete confinement chamber months after the disaster in 1986 but the facility has since decayed and now threatens to leak radiation.
