In Chernobyl the engineers now have plans to build a gigantic hangar to prevent a second disaster. The Ark…an arch-shaped tubular structure…is 360 feet high and 900 feet across. An estimated 200 tons of radioactive matter lies within the temporary structure and everything inside is contaminated. The European Union has spent tens of millions of pounds trying to stabilise the structure but many still fear a collapse and another catastrophe.

The £600 million Ark Project will contain the radioactive remains for the next 100 years while remote-controlled devices or specially trained teams try to dismantle the reactors and store the lethal material. David Sycamore, a Brit working for the EU in Kiev commented: ‘The new shelter is going to be the eighth wonder of the world – it’s an amazing piece of engineering which is on the scale of the Egyptians building the pyramids.’

The engineers may be coming to grips with the scale of the catastrophe but they represent a world of sanity in the smoke and mirrors world of Chernobyl as officials seek to play down the casualty figures. Here is Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine.

‘At least 500 000 people have already died out of the two million people officially classed as victims of Chernobyl. 34 499 people who took part in the clean up of Chernobyl have died in the years since the catastrophe. The death of these people from cancers was nearly three times as high as in the rest of the population. We have found that infant mortality increased 20% to 30% because of chronic exposure to radiation after the accident.’

The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organisation are ignoring this information according to Omelyanets. Yesterday The Independent quoted figures from The Chernobyl Forum…a group of a hundred scientists drawn together by the UN. They estimate the final death toll at four thousand from the fall-out with an additional five thousand radiation-related deaths in the heavily contaminated regions. The response of the Nuclear Industry is to insist that Chernobyl couldn’t happen in Western Europe because the Chernobyl Reactors had no strengthened containment shell, which are standard in the design of our nuclear reactors. So how safe are our sites?

Sellafield is one of the biggest nuclear sites in Europe, employing more than 10 000 people and is far more complex than sites like Chernobyl that tend to house only power plants. The Sellafield site is home to Calder Hall, the first British civil nuclear station and an array of other operations including Thorp, the spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, and SMP, which was built to produce Mixed Oxide Fuel for overseas customers using plutonium and uranium.

Formerly known as Windscale, it is the site where plutonium was produced for nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority believes that the Sellafield clean up will take at least 75 years. Legacy issues there include the continuing clean-up resulting from the 1957 shutdown as a result of a fire, and dealing with a number of ‘ponds’ where waste was dumped fairly indiscriminately.

The scale of the problems at the 770-acre site near Whitehaven is spelled out in the decommissioning authority’s draft strategy. ‘At Sellafield it has been estimated that there may be as much as 20 million cubic metres of contaminated land, some of which is deep underground, resulting largely from leakages from legacy sites,’ it says. At the B30 storage pond the European Commission has complained that it has not been possible to carry out checks to ensure that fissile materials intended for the civil nuclear programme have not been diverted to the military.

The Blair government denies this but the decommissioning authority admits: 'Delays in spent fuel retrieval have resulted in serious degradation of the fuel.’ Dave Skilbeck who is in charge of the B41 solid waste storage ‘silo’ at Sellafield, admits that there is only a partial inventory of what was thrown into the facility he is decommissioning. According to managers at the site, some of the problems stem from when the plant was asked to work flat out during the Miners’ Strike of 1984 - 5 to keep the lights on. Waste problems were rather pushed to one side with no thought of how you dealt with this later.

Meanwhile across the frozen North Slopes of Alaska the region’s largest oil accident on record has been sending hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil pouring into the Arctic Ocean after a badly corroded BP Pipeline ruptured. As oil is increasingly transported through environmentally sensitive areas by pipeline the dangers posed by poorly maintained rotting pipes has become increasingly clear. To quote a BP oilman: ‘Something happened to the corrosion rates in that line between September 2005 and the time of the spill that we don’t yet fully understand.’ At the last count clean-up crews had removed 40 000 gallons of crude oil and melted snow off the frozen tundra but indications are that this is the second largest crude oil spill in Alaska…second only to the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

The publicity caused by the leak in the 30-year-old pipeline is set to seriously damage BP’s image, which has been carefully crafted to show it as a company concerned about the environment. BP boasts that it is fully signed up to the dangers of Global Warming and makes a conspicuous effort to flaunt its green credentials. BP has even been erecting wind turbines above its petrol stations. Now they are all doing it…with Tescos the latest to announce Rooftop Turbines.