Chernobyl Is Due to Be Closed by the Year 2000

The Ukrainian government will close the accident-plagued Chernobyl nuclear station by the year 2000 and replace it with a gas-fired power station, a visiting delegation of Western officials announced Thursday.

“The new millennium will begin with a closed Chernobyl station,” said a delighted Michel Barnier, France’s environment minister, after hashing out the agreement in a two-hour meeting with Ukrainian President Leonid D. Kuchma and representatives of the European Union and the Group of Seven industrialized nations.

Barnier applauded Ukraine’s decision as “courageous and important” while noting that decommissioning the plant would be a complicated process.

“But now that Ukraine has given a definite date for closing the plant, we can decide these issues in solidarity,” he said, adding that a schedule for closing Chernobyl’s reactors will be ready next month.

The West had been annoyed by Ukraine’s earlier determination to keep operating the Chernobyl station, site nine years ago of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. An estimated 8,000 people have died from radiation-related disease since one of the four Chernobyl reactors melted down April 26, 1986. Half a million more suffered potentially dangerous exposure.

Friction has been especially intense between Ukraine and the rest of Europe, which was showered with radioactive fallout from Chernobyl and fears a repeat.

Ukraine has invested $300 million in improvements that it believes have made the plant one of the safest in the country. Ukraine had insisted that it would close Chernobyl only if the West was willing to pay for the “comprehensive solution” that Kuchma had advocated.

That meant not just flipping the “off” switch, which Kuchma said would make the plant even more dangerous, but also finding new sources of electricity, procuring jobs for Chernobyl’s 5,000 workers and ensuring the safety of the concrete “sarcophagus” covering the destroyed reactor.

Last month, Kuchma said that closing the facility was a political decision that Ukraine was ready to make--provided the “world approaches this problem comprehensively.”

Kuchma made no statement Thursday. However, his security adviser, Volodymyr Horbulin, welcomed the West’s new flexibility and its departure from the earlier, rigid linkage between releasing promised aid and closing Chernobyl, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported.

The Westerners, in turn, expressed satisfaction with what Barnier called Ukraine’s “strong, clear gesture emphasizing its desire to close Chernobyl.”

Neither side explained the reasons for the turnaround. But Environment Minister Yuri I. Kostenko suggested that Kuchma was seeking to remove the political barriers to Western financial aid now that he has embarked on a serious program of economic reform.

European credits to help Ukraine pay for essential oil and gas imports had hinged on Chernobyl’s closure.

The plant’s two operating reactors supply 5% of Ukraine’s electricity. If the third reactor, now under repair, were to go on-line, the share would increase to about 7%.

Kuchma proposed that the West help fund a modern, gas-powered electrical station in the Chernobyl region to supply both jobs and energy, Barnier said.

The director of the Chernobyl plant, Serhij Parashin, said that such a plant would cost $2 billion. But Barnier said no figures were discussed with Kuchma.

“Ukrainian and international experts must study this,” he said, suggesting that the World Bank might be able to fund the project.

Parashin insisted that a new power plant was needed if Chernobyl is to be closed because its workers “will feel they have no future and they will leave” to find other jobs. That, he said, would reduce safety during the decommissioning period.

Plugging the brain drain from Ukraine’s nuclear power industry is one reason Kiev lifted a moratorium on nuclear power development and scrapped earlier plans to close Chernobyl by this year.

Kuchma recently announced that he will issue a decree creating an international institute in the Chernobyl zone for studying the environmental effects of radiation and cleanup methods.

When the fourth Chernobyl reactor exploded, it spewed the equivalent of 70 Hiroshimas in radioactive fallout around the world. Nearly 3 million acres of land around the reactor are still contaminated with deadly cesium, strontium and plutonium. They are now useless for agriculture, but a scientist’s dream.

“It is a giant field laboratory,” Kostenko said.