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But he predicted the dispute would be resolved soon. “Hopefully a new government will be in place which will realise there is no alternative to proceed.”

David Sycamore, a Briton who works for the EU’s delegation in Kiev, said: “If a similar disaster had happened in Britain the sarcophagus couldn’t have been built in such a short time because in a democracy you couldn’t have ordered people into a fatally dangerous zone.

“The new shelter is going to be the eighth wonder of the world — it’s an amazing piece of engineering which is on the scale of the Egyptians building the pyramids.”

Ukrainians maintain that tens of thousands of people have died of radiation-related illnesses. After the disaster the city of Pripyat, which housed Chernobyl’s workers and their families, was emptied of inhabitants. Today it has a chilling, post-apocalyptic look to it.

Ragged curtains blow through the broken windows of apartments in deserted and crumbling high-rise blocks. The streets with their Lenin statues and fading posters exhorting a march towards a communist paradise are being reclaimed by vegetation.

The 47 villages in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl were also evacuated, but scores of mainly elderly people who could not adapt to the cramped city apartments they were offered, have returned surreptitiously. Eventually the authorities were forced tacitly to accept their presence. The zone’s inhabitants can collect their pensions and once every two weeks each village is visited by a policeman to check that everyone is still alive.

Adam Lahovskiy, an 82-year-old war veteran who lives in a small, single-storey timber cottage, said: “I was not going to allow the Chernobyl disaster to drive me out.” His wife Nina said that a van selling bread and other staples visited once a week and they spent their pension on food and medicine. They keep chickens and supplement their diet with berries and wild mushrooms — some of the food most contaminated by radiation. Their son visits regularly to help out.

Herds of boars are among the wildlife now thriving in the exclusion zone despite the radiation. Mostly free of human predators, the area provides sanctuary for moose, rare Przewalski horses and even wolves.

Although most Ukrainians wanted to close down their nuclear industry for years after the accident, four other power stations — including Europe’s largest at Zaporizhya — have continued to operate.

Ukraine is dependent for much of its energy, especially gas, on Russia, which quadrupled prices earlier this year as punishment for Ukraine straying away from Moscow’s orbit and cultivating closer ties with the EU and Nato.

Developing the country’s nuclear industry has become a priority: Ukraine wants to build up to 13 more reactors for its own needs and to export electricity to western Europe.

David Corbett from Lancashire, who works for a private company hired by the EU, said: “We are here to ensure another Chernobyl can never happen.”

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