There was a massive nuclear accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of Ukraine in April of 1986. A test was being conducted on the emergency backup systems for core cooling. The operators triggered a reactor shutdown, but a combination of unstable conditions and reactor design flaws caused an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction instead. There was an explosion that ruptured the reactor core followed by a fire that release radioactive particles into the atmosphere which were carried across Europe.
     By December 1986, a protective Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant sarcophagus was built to enclose the ruins of the plant and prevent the further spread of radioactive materials. Recently a new bigger sarcophagus was completed to cover the original sarcophagus.
    Now the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant has been chosen as a testing ground for new South Korean technologies for the treatment of radioactive materials. This announcement was made by Oleksandr Skomarokhov, ChNPP deputy director of radioactive waste management for Ukraine after the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding last month by Sergei Kalashnyk, the head of the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management (SAUEZM), and Won Seok Park, the president of the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI).
      Skomarokhov made a statement on the SAUEZM website where he said that the agreement enables KAERI to carry out the decontamination of concrete and metal fragments of stainless steel and carbon steel. He went on to say “KAERI has technical developments aimed at the decontamination of radioactively contaminated surfaces, but it can’t test these technologies because there are no actual (non-artificially) contaminated surfaces in Korea today. At the same time, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which is being decommissioned, is constantly looking for the ways and means both to qualitatively perform decontamination of materials and to significantly reduce the amount of radioactive waste produced in this process. Thus, the ChNPP site is a kind of laboratory testing ground for KAERI technology specialists.”
     KAERI said that the MoU can be considered as an extension to its research on the practical use of nuclear dismantling core technologies that have been developed by the Nuclear Technology Development Project of South Korea’s Ministry of Science and Technology. KAERI and the Ministry are planning to demonstrate the technology at ChNPP and then develop practical models for its use in third countries. ChNPP has been closed down since the 1986. No full-scale dismantling and decommissioning work has been undertaken there. Such work is scheduled to begin in 2045 according to KAERI.
     The use of radioactive concrete processing technology separates and processes concrete waste produced by the dismantling of nuclear facilities by using high heat and physical force to separate aggregate and cement. This process can reduce the amount of radioactive waste left over by as much as fifty percent according to KAERI.
     Decontamination technology for radioactively contaminated metal equipment utilizes a foam decontamination agent applied to a large area of a building or to large equipment. The foam is then washed off to remove radioactive materials which reduces the contamination to about ten percent of its original level.
     In addition, KAERI plans to demonstrate radioactive waste disposal technology, field measurement technology and soil treatment technology for large-area contamination sites as well as “residential restoration” technology in a series of project.
      Won Seok Park said, “This agreement will be an opportunity to share technology and know-how with Ukrainian people with experience in the field of nuclear dismantling and to build future-oriented partnerships.”