How Do You Bury a Reactor That Still Burns? Chernobyl's New Safe Confinement

A silver, windowless arch now stands over Chernobyl's Reactor Four, built from 36,000 tonnes of steel, at a cost of roughly €1.5 billion, with a design life of 100 years — and the reactor underneath it is still broken, still radioactive, still not cleaned up. This film traces how engineers solved a problem that had no safe direct solution: the 1986 Sarcophagus, built in 206 days by workers who could only stay minutes at a time, was never meant to last, and by 2013 it was physically failing. The answer was to build an entirely new confinement structure 300 meters away, where crews could work safely, then slide the finished, 257-meter-wide arch across the ground on Teflon-coated skid shoes until it settled over the old shelter without a single welder ever working above the hot core. The video follows that construction and move in real drone and archival footage, through the sealing, the ventilation system, the funding from more than 40 countries, and the 2022 occupation and 2025 drone strike that tested it — ending on the question of what this structure was actually built to do, and what still has to happen after it. CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 3:50 Sand, Clay, Lead 4:51 A Temporary Tomb 6:55 The Roof Falls In 7:43 Building It Elsewhere 9:22 Three Eiffel Towers 11:23 Sliding the Mountain 13:34 Sealed, Not Solved 16:32 War Over the Wreckage SOURCES Reuters - New Chernobyl shelter arch slides into place (29 November 2016) BBC News - Chernobyl: Huge new structure covers reactor (29 November 2016) IAEA - Chernobyl New Safe Confinement project page EBRD - Chernobyl Shelter Fund project page Reuters - Russian drone strike damages Chernobyl's protective shelter, Ukraine says (14 February 2025) Do you think the planned robotic dismantling of the old Sarcophagus will actually happen within the arch's 100-year design life, or will funding and conflict keep pushing it back? Subscribe to Concrete & Nerve for a new mega build every day:    / @concreteandnerve   Real footage, photos and documents throughout; the technical animations are drawn diagrams. The thumbnail is an illustration. #Engineering #Chernobyl #Construction