New Chernobyl Disaster Feared

LONDON - Soviet scientists leading the five-year operation to make the Chernobyl nuclear reactor safe have appealed for Western technological help to avert a second disaster.

Without such help, they said they will be powerless to prevent a radioactive dust leak in the next five to seven years, which would contaminate thousands of people living nearby.

Alexander Baravoi and Victor Popov, who head the team of several hundred scientists working inside the highly radioactive reactor, expressed their fears on a British Broadcasting Corp. television program shown last night.

The physicists told the inside story of the building of the sarcophagus, which encased the reactor in a steel tomb through the labors of 600,000 workmen known as "liquidators."

They said the chemical explosion which rocked the plant on April 26, 1986 - five years ago Friday - not only flipped the 2,000-ton lid from the reactor but also forced its floor to drop 12 feet, with 135 tons of nuclear fuel pouring through the gap to form a solidified lava.

They described how the team searched for the missing fuel until December 1986. Eventually, they discovered an intensely radioactive mass of solidified fuel in the basement of the reactor building, which they christened the "elephant's foot" because of its shape. They bitterly attacked the Soviet government, accusing it of condemning the team to carry out its highly dangerous task with inadequate protective clothing, badly equipped laboratories and "miserly" financial support.

The program showed how the sarcophagus, built in just three months, is crumbling, heightening the danger of a second accident.

Beneath the steel frame, pockmarked with holes several feet across, are layers of radioactive plutonium, cesium and uranium dust. A collapse of part of the structure would send hundreds of tons of the lethal dust into the atmosphere. Water is sprinkled onto the dust piles every day to damp them down, but the piles are growing as the hardened nuclear fuel formed by the explosion crumbles.

The danger of a second accident is compounded by the precarious position of the huge reactor lid, perched among twisted pipes in the reactor vessel mouth, which the scientists fear could tip over at any time. But they said they cannot take adequate measures to make it safe without international help.

"Only with a joint science and engineering effort will we find the best solution," said Baravoi, from Moscow's Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. "We have suggested to our leadership that there should be an international effort. I don't know if this will be permitted."

Options under consideration for dealing with the sarcophagus include entombing it in concrete, covering it in sand or building a second airtight sarcophagus, to be dismantled in a few hundred years' time.

Baravoi also said the health effects on the population of the Chernobyl area have been "much worse" than initially expected.