Video Transcript: >> Reporter: From the initial panic at chernobyl to the lack of a permanent solution 25 years later, a lesson in just how hard it is to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle. Today radioactivity still leaks from the crumbling structure hastily put up to cover the damaged reactors just as it did when we went there three years ago. Right now the dose rate is something like 200 times over what we have in washington, D.C. >> Reporter: Experts say that's about the same as 16 chest x-rays in one day and the effect is cumulative. A more permanent solution to entomb the chernobyl reactor has been planned for years. A massive steel dome taller than the statue of liberty and wider than the st. Louis gateway arch to be built at a distance because of the radiation will be rolled into place section by section over the still deadly reactor. But the dome hasn't yet begun to take shape. The U.S. And the european union are still struggling to raise the $2 billion it will cost. In japan, the fukushima complex will also have to be entombed and the radiation levels will make that very difficult. >> These reactors are never going to be used again. They're going to have to be entombed for a significant length of time before anything's able to be done about them. >> Reporter: And ja n japan, officials are dealing not with just one rogue reactor but six of them. >> I would hope that we'd be able to clean those up with less difficulty than we faced with the one reactor at chernobyl, but I don't know with the twists and turns of this thing, I don't know that that's a guarantee. >> Reporter: That still-unfinished containment dome at chair snobl projected to last just one hundred years, but chernobyl, like the japanese plant at fukushima, will remain radioactive and deadly for thousands of years. Bill plante, cbs news, washington.
Chernobyl: 25 years later
March 18, 2011 4:25 PM
The cleanup is still nowhere near finished in Chernobyl, 25 years after the world's worst nuclear accident. And, as Bill Plante reports, Chernobyl concerned just one rogue reactor, while Japan is struggling to control six.
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