Containing Chernobyl
In the late 1990s, Eric Schmieman, then-chief engineer at Battelle Memorial Institute, and his team were tapped to head to Chernobyl\u2014the infamous site of the largest nuclear accident in history\u2014to build a never-before-attempted containment system for the radioactive facility. The New Safe Confinement team faced difficult bureaucratic conditions left in the wake of the Soviet Union\u2019s collapse plus other barriers that may sound familiar to many federal employees trying to solve problems in innovative ways.