A Fire Is Burning Near Chernobyls Already-Damaged Shelter. Nobody Knows if It Made Things Worse.
A wildfire is burning through the Chernobyl exclusion zone, and the fire is close enough to a structure that engineers spent two decades building and that a Russian drone already punched a hole through eight months ago.
Ukrainian authorities said the fire broke out Thursday after a drone crashed in the zone, spreading across roughly 11 square kilometers by Friday morning, according to Euronews. Satellite imagery seen by New Scientist suggests the burn area has since grown to 24.4 square kilometers. As of May 8, 331 responders and 75 pieces of equipment were working the fire, New Scientist reported, complicated by dry conditions, strong winds, and the presence of unexploded land mines left over from the conflict.
The blaze is burning southeast of the Chernobyl nuclear plant's former cooling ponds — the same general area as the New Safe Confinement (NSC), the massive arch-shaped structure that covers the reactor that exploded in 1986. The NSC was already severely damaged. On February 14, 2025, a Russian Shahed drone — the kind Ukraine says Russia has been flying over the zone en route to other targets — struck the NSC, tearing a 15-square-meter hole through its outer and inner cladding, according to The Guardian. The explosion's fire spread through the NSC's cladding layers over an area described by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) as roughly the size of 18 parked cars, with the fire taking two weeks to extinguish. The NSC's sandwich-panel cladding consists of inner and outer metal panels with a ventilated gap maintained at slight overpressure to contain radioactive contaminants, according to Wikipedia.
The NSC — a 35-story steel arch built at a cost of €2.1 billion ($2.5 billion) and designed to last 100 years — was intended to contain radiation while engineers dismantled the original sarcophagus and removed radioactive material, according to Wikipedia. The drone strike "severely affected the NSC's two primary functions: containing radiological hazards and supporting long-term decommissioning," the EBRD said in a May 2026 statement, reported on its website. "Key systems designed to ensure the NSC's 100-year lifespan have been rendered non-operational, with a significant risk of further deterioration and corrosion of the main steel structure." Repair costs could exceed €500 million ($585 million), and engineers estimate the fixes need to be complete by 2030 to prevent that corrosion from weakening the structure permanently. The work involves special shielding because radiation levels inside the arch are too high for ordinary construction crews.
Firefighters on the current blaze face a similar constraint. The State Emergency Service of Ukraine said some areas are too dangerous to enter because of mines. The CREBR nature reserve said responders are breathing air with high concentrations of radionuclides and undergo body contamination checks after shifts, New Scientist reported.
Whether the spreading fire has affected the damaged NSC — whether the structure's compromised cladding, already vulnerable to outside air and corrosion, is now exposed to heat and embers from a fire burning in the same area — has not been independently confirmed. The EBRD said it is assessing the damage from the February strike but did not respond to questions about the current fire's proximity to repair work by publication time. An IAEA spokesperson said radiation levels at the site remain within normal limits.
Denys Vyshnevskiy at the CREBR said radiation levels five to ten kilometers from the fire are normal, and the risk of contamination spreading beyond the exclusion zone is minimal. Olena Burdo at the Institute for Nuclear Research in Kyiv, who was near the site when the fire started, agreed the immediate contamination risk is low.
The broader pattern is harder to dismiss. The Chernobyl exclusion zone has been repeatedly overflown by Russian drones heading to targets deeper in Ukraine. The NSC has now been struck twice — first in February, and the site now sits adjacent to an expanding wildfire started by a third drone. The structure that took 20 years to build and €2.1 billion to build was designed to contain the most radioactive disaster in history for a century. Eight months after the February drone strike, it has a hole, fire damage across its outer skin, and a repair timeline measured in years. Nobody has said whether the newest fire has made any of that worse.