WORLD : Ukraine Wants Chernobyl Closed
The Ukrainian Parliament has voted to work out a plan to completely close the Chernobyl nuclear plant in five years, the republic’s major newspaper reported in information reaching Moscow today.
Site of the world’s worst civilian nuclear accident almost four years ago, the Chernobyl station had been the topic of growing debate in the Ukraine’s legislature, whose members have been deluged with allegations of continuing radiation danger.
Thirty-one people were killed in the explosion of the No. 4 reactor at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, and about 90,000 people had to be evacuated from a 19-mile exclusion zone around the station.
In its March 1 edition, the Pravda Ukraina newspaper printed the resolution passed Feb. 17 by the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet on a plan to close the station by 1995. The resolution, published on the front page of the newspaper, ordered the Ukrainian government to provide the necessary funds to close the troubled plant, whose crippled No. 4 reactor is entombed in a cement sarcophagus.
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