Contributors to the Chornobyl Shelter Fund on April 29 will meet at the EuropeanBank for Reconstruction and Development’s head office in London for a meetingcalled by the Group of Seven leading rich and developing nations to raise additional funds for the completion of a new confinement to cover the Chornobyl nuclear power plant.
The confinement was slated for completion in 2015, but after a
reassessment, the deadline was extended to mid-2017. Besides being off
schedule, the project also is now over budgeted at €615-million.
Because the project is the first of its kind, it has been practically
impossible to gauge all of the unforeseeable variables in the construction of
the shell. Problems involving corrosion and the consequent need for intricate humidity
controls have been particularly problematic, engineers and project managers
say.
“It’s the complexity, the scale and the unique nature of the task
that we face in this project,” Sergey Kurykin, deputy minister of Ukraine’s
ecology ministry, said which is cooperating with international donors in the confinement’s
construction. “These are among the reasons for the delay and cost increase.”
“This estimates for the new safe confinement cost were
independently verified by multiple audits and the new contract amendment was
signed in October 2014 for an amount of €1.42 billion,” Vince Novak, director
for nuclear safety at EBRD, said. The total cost of the shelter implementation
plan is estimated at around €2.15 billion, with €1.42 billion allocated for the
confinement.
In 1997, the EBRD set up the Chernobyl Shelter Fund to finance the confinement’s
construction to be built over a first, temporary shelter constructed in 1986 in
the wake of the nuclear accident. Twenty-six contributors have signed on to the
fund already, which has gathered €1.23 billion. The main donors are EBRD with €675
million and the European Commission with €361 million. Russia, the legal
inheritor of the Soviet Union, is the eighth largest contributor, having
donated as much as €58.3 million.
The accident was the result of a flawed nuclear reactor design that was
operated with inadequately trained personnel, according to the World Nuclear
Association. As a result, the Chornobyl 4 reactor was destroyed, killing 30
operators and firemen within three months and several further deaths later. At
least 5 percent of the radioactive reactor core was released into the
atmosphere.
In 2007, French consortium Novarka, Vinci Construction Grands
Projets and Bouygues Travaux Publics were chosen for the construction. The 110-meter high arch over the reactor is
designed to be a safe shelter for at least 100 years.
“This structure will withstand class-3 tornados,
earthquakes on the Richter scale of six, be fire-resistant, be
humidity-resistant, be radiation-resistant,” Novak says. The surface is
made of 18 hectares of stainless steel and the whole construction weighs 31,000
tons.
The EBRD plans to contribute an additional €350 million and the EC will step up its
contribution with 70 million, according to an April 27statement by EC President Jean-Claude
Juncker during the EU-Ukraine summit in
Kyiv.
Individual contributors are still needed to close the remaining funding gap.
“We don’t need the money tomorrow, we have enough money till the
end of the year,” Nicolas Caille,
project director at Novarka consortium, told the Kyiv Post. The EBRD commitment
of €350 million makes
the project even more sustainable because Novarka currently spends
approximately €250 million per year
on the project.
“Traditionally the G-7 has taken the lead in fundraising activities
for Chernobyl projects and the G-7 members have been the largest donors to
these funds,” a senior EC official from the nuclear safety department says.
He refused to be identified, as he is not authorized to speak to press.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olena Gordiienko
can be reached at [email protected].
