Critical Update

In the late 1990s, Eric Schmieman, then-chief engineer at Battelle Memorial Institute, and his team were tapped to head to Chernobyl—the infamous site of the largest nuclear accident in history—to 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’s collapse plus other barriers that may sound familiar to many federal employees trying to solve problems in innovative ways.