You're reading: Ukraine prepares for solemn Chernobyl closure

Despite stoppage, the plant's reactors will not be considered safe until all nuclear fuel is removed, a process expected to take until 2008

sure of the Chernobyl atomic power plant, site of the world’s worst nuclear accident that came to symbolize the potential dangers of atomic energy.

“It is very symbolic that the world will enter the next millennium without the Chernobyl plant,” said presidential spokesman Oleksandr Martynenko, describing Friday’s closure as one of the most important events of the century.

Technically, however, it will a very small step. Chernobyl’s only working reactor, No. 3, stopped producing electricity on Dec. 6 when it was shut down over a steam leak.

Ukraine’s nuclear regulatory body reluctantly approved the reactor’s restart at minimum capacity to conduct unspecified experiments beginning Thursday, as if to give this former Soviet republic something to ceremonially close down.

But the state Energoatom company said the reactor was not in good enough condition to have it power the generators that produce electricity.

“To shut it down, physical experiments need to be conducted in the reactor’s active zone,” said a senior Energoatom official, Viktor Stovbun. “The reactor will be brought to 5 percent of capacity, the experiments will take some 24 hours and it will be stopped Dec. 15.”

After years of refusing to shut down Chernobyl, Ukraine labored in earnest to stress the importance of its move, which would fulfill a pledge by President Leonid Kuchma during U.S. President Bill Clinton’s visit earlier in the year.

Kuchma was due to take visiting dignitaries, among them the prime ministers of Russia and Belarus and the U.S. energy secretary, to the plant Thursday. The group also was to visit Slavutych, the town of Chernobyl workers who will be hit hard by the closure.

On Friday, a ceremony at the posh Ukraina Palace in Kyiv is to mark the actual closure, with Kuchma issuing the shutdown command through a television link with the plant 135 kilometers (84 miles) away.

Many in Ukraine and the world over will breathe a sigh of relief once that happens. For Ukraine and neighboring Belarus, Chernobyl is a wound that will take years to heal, while anti-nuclear activists and foreign governments see it as a dangerous installation still running outdated Soviet RBMK model reactors.

The Chernobyl tragedy began on April 26, 1986, when reactor No. 4 exploded and caught fire, contaminating vast areas in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus and spewing a radioactive cloud over Europe.

It was nearly invisible at first: the Kremlin tried to keep the disaster under wraps and deadly radiation could not be seen with the eye. The amount of it, the United Nations says, exceeded by at least 100 times that released by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

But the after-effects are only too visible: thousands of deaths among some 650,000 people who took part in the hasty and poorly organized cleanup; the 2,600 square kilometers (1,040 square miles) of no-man’s land around Chernobyl, once home to 120,000 people in 90 flourishing villages; 70,000 people disabled by radiation in Ukraine alone, according to government figures.

About 3.4 million of Ukraine’s 50 million people, including some 1.26 million children, are considered affected by Chernobyl. Overall, some 3 million children in Ukraine and elsewhere require treatment and “many will die prematurely,” U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote recently.

“Not until 2016 at the earliest will be known the full number of those likely to develop serious medical conditions” because of delayed reactions to radiation exposure, he warned.

Chernobyl’s troubles did not stop with the accident. The plant’s No. 2 reactor caught fire and was shut down in 1991, and reactor No. 1 was halted in 1996. The one remaining working reactor has experienced numerous unplanned shutdowns and malfunctions in recent years.

Yet energy-strapped Ukraine refused to close it before securing Western aid to build two new nuclear reactors – a fresh irritant for many Ukrainians in a country swept by periodic waves of radiation panic.

Pushing the switch that will bring down control rods into the reactor core is the easiest step that remains to be taken at Chernobyl.

Even after stoppage, the reactors will not be considered safe until all nuclear fuel is removed, a process expected to be completed in 2008.

The leaky concrete and steel sarcophagus, a Soviet-era monster that encases the ruined rector No. 4, will take years to make environmentally safe. The government still appears to have no clear program of assistance and new jobs for Chernobyl’s nearly 6,000 workers and their families. Few of them, if any, will rejoice Friday.

“The decision is taken and we’ll close down here,” says Chernobyl spokesman Stanislav Shekstelo. “But it will be a sad day for us.”