Almost three decades of the largest nuclear accident in history have passed, and Chernobyl in northern Ukraine, remains one of the creepiest corners of the globe. Not only because the exclusion zone of 30 kilometers around the nuclear plant be a post-apocalyptic landscape of villages and abandoned roads, where nature becomes her way through uninhabited houses.

But by the still latent threat of another catastrophe. The reactor number 4exploded in the early hours of April 26, 1986. And took a cloud of radioactivity over Europe no longer be a danger until it is sealed. And the money to get it is running.

The international community bears  the construction of the so-called second sarcophagus, an impressive feat of engineering that has become the largest ever raised mobile structure. A cage to contain the beast that lurks under the first sarcophagus, hastily built in the months following the accident and trailing a long history of repairs.

The concrete structure is fragile and had to be stabilized between 2004 and 2008. This new steel roof, 260 meters wide and 110 meters high, will protect it from the weather and, most importantly, hermetically isolate the reactor in case collapse. Safe for future generations.

The uniqueness of the work entrusted to French consortium Novarka  is the reason for the delay in the initial plans to have the shell list in 2015.

The bank ahead of 120 million euros for the work did not stop, and provide another 230 when the G7 and the Commission to the 165 to which they are committed. It will still be 100, which will ask the international community at a donor conference scheduled for late April in London.

“Finishing the project in 2017 is extremely important not only for safety in Ukraine but throughout Europe.”

An eerie skeleton surrounded by cranes welcomes the visitor that enters the plant. The place seems stuck in the Soviet era.  Just activity unless seen in the works of the buffer that will receive the spent nuclear fuel as well-funded by the international community and should be completed in 2016 and construction of the new sarcophagus, which have come to work 1,200 people.

The state of the reactor is a mystery to scientists. After the explosion, the fuel-more than 200 tons of uranium merged with hundreds of tons of debris, sand, lead and boric acid dropped from helicopters to cover it.

The result is a glowing heap, a kind of extremely radioactive magma. Ukraine has yet to decide what to do with it. So basically the new sarcophagus help you save time, says Novak. Long time.

It is designed to withstand 100 years, says Nicolas Caille, project manager Novarka. It has a double skin with an air chamber and a sophisticated ventilation system. “We will monitor the air and always keep the humidity below 40% to prevent corrosion,” he explains.

The high radioactivity prevented build the dome directly over the reactor, so has risen to 300 meters and then move up to cover it. Workers have been able to be alone three hours in the work to make full days thanks to a thick concrete wall that isolates them from radiation was built.

Moving the giant takes between one and three days, at 10 meters per hour. The metal arc slide on rails Teflon. “No wheels in the world that support a structure of 36,000 tons,” said Caille.

It will be equipped with two cranes that support 50 tons. A specially designed membrane seal it for the project. When necessary, the equipment may be introduced in the future allow disassembly the reactor and remove the contaminated materials. A process taking decades.

Much of the area around Chernobyl will never live again. Radioactive isotopes decay with a period of 24,000 years.  The aquifers are contaminated.

In some towns, like Kopachi, houses were demolished and buried explains Yuri Tatarchuk, who works as an official escort visitors and tourists. Only weeds are covered mounds on which posters were nailed to the yellow symbol of radioactivity.”In ancient Slavic town name translates as undertaker. It is as if predict their future, “he says.

The lasting image is perhaps most amazing of Pripyat, how a ghost town that once was bult as a model Soviet city.   In 1986 the average age of its population, plant workers and their families, did not exceed 30 years.Its inhabitants were evacuated within hours in hundreds of buses.

“They said it was for three days, but became three weeks, months, years … never able to return,” says Tatarchuk, in his dosimeter showing how radiation is triggered in the main square of the town only to bring it down.

After the accident another city was built outside the exclusion zone, Slavutich, where they now live most workers. A railway transports them the 55 kilometers that separate it from the plant. Some also live inside in unpolluted areas, as the people of Chernobyl.

But can only stay there in shifts of 15 days. And then there are the squatters , mostly retirees who refuse to live elsewhere and the authorities turn a blind eye.

For them the dead zone of Chernobyl is a home.