OK, so guaranteed is rather a strong word. The amount of radiation seeping out of the still-contaminated plant is minimal, which is why the 2,500 employees still working there take it in shifts. Get through your tour in about half an hour and you shouldn't register more than a slightly unhealthy dose on the radiation detector in the doctor's office that's sure to have been set up a few miles away from the plant.
Seriously, why would people take a tour of this place? The 25th anniversary (if we can use such a word for such a travesty-tragedy) is in 2011, so interest in Chernobyl will be high. But do you really need to go in there and have a look round to be able to say something akin to, "Yep, it's still a place to be avoided"?To this day, people for dozens of miles around are reporting health problems. And that's today. That's nothing compared to what happened shortly April 26, 1986, when the exclusion stretched more than 30 miles in all directions.
Oh, sure, the Emergency Situations Ministry says that plans for building an impressive new shell over the reactor are progressing along nicely. That's one big shell, as well, weighing in at 20,000 tons and measuring 345 feet tall, 853 feet wide, and 490 feet long. (In case you carry such measurements around in your head or you have a guidebook handy, that's big enough to get over the top and all the sides of Notre Dame.
Did we mention the pricetag? It's up to $1.15 billion now, up just a bit from the original estimate of $505 million. Cost overruns are surely nothing new to government and/or construction projects.
The timeline for completion of this fancy new shell, by the way, is 2015. So the budget could blow out again. (Let's hope that's the only thing that blows out.) But if the shell won't be finished until 2015, then I don't like our chances of getting a radiation-free tour before then — in which case I say, "Why bother?" Yes, we are naturally curious. No, we don't want to see Chernobyl that badly.
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