Chernobyl Plant Start-Up Planned

The chief of Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power station, site of the world’s worst civil nuclear accident, said Thursday that he plans to restart one of the plant’s reactors next month.

“Reconstruction work on Reactor No. 3 is completed,” said Sergei Parashin, general director of the Chernobyl power station about 80 miles north of Kiev, the capital. “We plan to generate power into the national grid on May 5.”

Reactor No. 3--the only one of four reactors that has functioned since Chernobyl’s No. 4 reactor exploded on April 26, 1986, with tragic human and environmental consequences--was shut down last year after cracks were discovered in the cooling system’s pipes.

Western nations are pressuring the impoverished former Soviet republic to shut down Chernobyl completely by 2000. But Ukraine is playing a tough game of poker with Western nations over Chernobyl’s closure.

Ukraine wants more than $2 billion in aid to clean up the fourth reactor and finish two new nuclear stations in the western part of the nation. It will not shut down Chernobyl until Western donors come up with the cash.

The restart of the reactor will come four days before this year’s annual meeting of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the main representative of Western donors to Chernobyl, to be held in Kiev.