U.S., Ukraine in Accord to Shut Chernobyl

The Chernobyl nuclear reactor plant, site of the world’s worst nuclear accident and still a major source of electric power, will cease operations under an agreement struck between the United States and Ukraine, U.S. officials announced Saturday.

Deputy Energy Secretary Bill White told reporters that a delegation from the U.S. Department of Energy, working with Ukrainian officials over the course of several days, secured a “commitment in principle” to shut down Chernobyl’s two remaining nuclear reactors “at the earliest possible date.”

The closure would follow a U.S.-Ukrainian study of options for replacing the lost energy. American officials said that energy conservation and more efficient technologies, including cleaner, coal-burning power-plant designs, could more than make up the difference.

“This public statement puts Ukraine unalterably on the path to a shutdown,” White said in Washington within an hour of his return from Kiev, Ukraine’s capital. He called the decision “courageous and creative.”

While acknowledging that previous efforts to close the plant had failed, White expressed confidence that the combination of Western technical assistance and Ukraine’s changing political climate would allow Ukrainian officials to follow through on the accord.

But the two governments left unresolved significant differences over how quickly the Chernobyl plant should be shuttered. White declared flatly that the reactors should halt operations no later than mid-June, when the joint study is expected to be complete. His Ukrainian counterpart, Vice Prime Minister Valery Shmarov, has argued that the plants could not be decommissioned until alternative sources of energy are secured--no sooner than 1998 or 1999.

The conflicting timetables suggest that Ukraine, which bargained hard before recently giving up Soviet-era nuclear weapons on its soil, may seek more concessions or guarantees from the West before it shuts down the reactors.

The Chernobyl power station seized the world’s attention in April, 1986, when an explosion in one of its four reactors sent clouds of radioactive dust spreading across Eastern Europe and Scandinavia and much of the former Soviet Union. Although the death toll at the time was officially put at 32, Ukrainian authorities have since claimed that up to 8,000 people subsequently died from illnesses brought on by the explosion and its aftermath.

The inoperative reactor involved in the incident remains entombed in a leaky casement of sand and concrete. But two other reactors in the complex--No. 1 and No. 3--continue to generate electricity. Ukraine, seeking reliable sources for additional energy, had planned to repair and recommission the remaining reactor.

White said that Washington will provide technical assistance and funds for the shutdown through the World Bank and the European Development Bank. The Clinton Administration plans to explore whether a pool of funds earmarked by Congress to help the former Soviet republics retire their nuclear weapons could be used to help take the Chernobyl plant out of operation.

If implemented, the agreement could mark the end of a long and frustrating effort by much of the world community to persuade the Soviet Union--and, later, independent Ukraine--to decommission the reactors, which sit in an eerie, depopulated wasteland north of Kiev. No one except the plant’s 4,500 employees is allowed to travel within roughly 20 miles of the blown-out radioactive core of Reactor No. 4.

Experts said the shutdown would mark the end of operations for a pair of reactors that are among the world’s most dangerous and unstable. The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. body that monitors the safety and security of nuclear materials worldwide, concluded in late March that “numerous safety deficiencies” remain at the Chernobyl nuclear power station. It suggested that the entombed reactor involved in the 1986 accident could collapse.

Such an event “would have serious consequences,” the IAEA noted. And White predicted that it would create a significant obstacle to the orderly shutdown of the remaining reactors.

White told reporters that a visit to the plant provided unsettling indications of the continuing hazard involved in operating the Chernobyl reactors.

The average age of plant employees is under 30, and there have been two full turnovers of personnel there, leaving relatively inexperienced workers to manage any emergency. Hallways were lined with flammable plastic material, and White said he saw one plant operator light a cigarette in a control area. Smoking would be strictly forbidden in such an area within a U.S. nuclear plant.

Still, Ukrainians have argued that the reactors must be permitted to continue operations or the country’s beleaguered economy will founder further. In December, as Ukraine faced a harsh winter and had no hard currency to pay Russia for oil and gas to run its factories, a decision to close the power station was canceled by the Ukrainian Parliament.

While the two operational reactors at Chernobyl supply roughly 7% of Ukraine’s electricity needs, the cost of operating them has been an onerous burden for the cash-strapped government. Continuing cleanup efforts and public-health programs designed to treat victims of the disaster consume 12% of the former Soviet republic’s annual budget.

White said conservation measures in a country that uses energy as inefficiently as Ukraine could be applied easily and quickly. He added that the recent Russian decision to accept barter, rather than hard currency, for its oil and gas would make it easier for Ukraine to find alternative energy supplies beyond its border.