15 One of the equipment graveyards to which buses, fire trucks, helicopters, armored vehicles, and construction equipment—too contaminated to be removed from the exclusion zone surrounding the plant—were consigned after the accident. By 1997, according to one estimate, the total losses resulting from the accident had reached $128 billion. 16 The “Elephant’s Foot,” the huge congealed mass of once-molten sand, uranium fuel, steel, and concrete, found in the autumn of 1986 by the scientists of the Chernobyl Complex Expedition in the basement beneath the ruins of Reactor Number Four. It remained
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