Chernobyl Officials Practice Shutdown for Visiting VIPs

Engineers at the Chernobyl nuclear power station shut down its last working reactor a day earlier than planned Thursday, in an impromptu attempt to impress visiting President Leonid D. Kuchma.

But officials said the plant would be restarted so as not to spoil a televised button-pushing ceremony planned for today when the power station, which caused the world’s worst nuclear accident, is finally put to rest.

The April 1986 disaster sent a radioactive cloud over Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and other parts of Europe. About 30 plant workers and firefighters died soon after the explosion, and radiation has since been blamed for thousands of deaths.

Kuchma, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail M. Kasyanov and Belarussian Prime Minister Vladimir V. Yermoshin witnessed the unscheduled shutdown while touring the control room of reactor No. 3.

Reactor No. 3’s closure came after weeks of technical glitches. It had to shut down once because of downed power lines and once because of a steam leak.

“In Kuchma’s presence, a duty officer carried out an experimental shutdown of the reactor,” said Oleh Holoskokov, an aide to Chernobyl’s director. “The reactor is stopped, but we will try to restart it again” for today’s ceremony.

The process of decommissioning Chernobyl will take years, and the last fuel rods are not scheduled to be taken away until 2008.

The mood at the power station has been grim. It still provides Ukraine with about 5% of its electricity, and closure means the gradual phasing out of the thousands of jobs Chernobyl provides.

Rainy weather gave an ominous look to the gray concrete sarcophagus encasing Chernobyl’s ruined reactor No. 4--the one that exploded.

Even as preparations for the closure were in full swing, Ukraine’s parliament on Thursday adopted a Communist-sponsored nonbinding resolution urging the government to postpone the shutdown at least until April. Kuchma dismissed the step as “political games.”

For years, Ukraine resisted international calls to close Chernobyl. Kuchma, however, pledged earlier this year to close the plant.

Kuchma is to issue the shutdown command from Kiev, the capital, about 80 miles to the south, through a television link with the plant.