CHERNOBYL, Dec. 14 – Ukraine restarted Chernobyl’s only working reactor one last time on Thursday before shutting down the ill-fated atomic plant for good, as President Leonid Kuchma took visiting dignitaries on a tour of the world’s worst nuclear disaster site.
Reactor No. 3 was stopped on Dec. 6 because of a steam leak, and Ukraine’s nuclear regulatory body initially objected to restarting it, demanding thorough checks. But with the solemn final shutdown ceremony long scheduled for Friday, regulators had little choice but to give their reluctant approval.
The state Energoatom company said the reactor was too faulty to bring it to its full output level, so it will work only at minimum capacity to provide for some pre-shutdown «experiments.» The reactor was working at 1-percent capacity on Thursday morning, the company’s press office said.
After years of refusing to close Chernobyl because of the electricity it provides, this former Soviet republic labored to stress the significance of the shutdown. Kuchma pledged to close the plant during U.S. President Bill Clinton’s visit earlier this year.
«It is very symbolic that the world will enter the next millennium without the Chernobyl plant,» said presidential spokesman Oleksandr Martynenko. He described Friday’s closure as one of the most important events of the century.
Kuchma was due to meet with plant officials and workers on Thursday as well as to visit Slavutych, the nearby town built for Chernobyl workers who will be hit hard by the closure.
On Friday, a state ceremony at the 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.
For Ukraine and neighboring Belarus, Chernobyl is a wound that will take years to heal, while anti-nuclear activists and concerned foreign governments the world over see it as a highly dangerous installation still running outdated Soviet RBMK reactors.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.
Today, its deadly legacy is evident across Ukraine.
More than 4,000 Ukrainians from among those who took part in the hasty and poorly organized Soviet cleanup effort have died and 70,000 were disabled by radiation, 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 neighboring Belarus and Russia require treatment and «many will die prematurely,» while the full number of those who are likely to develop serious medical consequences will become known only after 2016, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote recently.
Despite the 1986 disaster and a 1991 fire that crippled another Chernobyl reactor, energy-strapped Ukraine refused to close the plant before securing Western aid to build two new nuclear reactors.
Pushing the switch that will bring down control rods into the last reactor’s core is the easiest step that remains to be taken in shutting Chernobyl.
Even after the stoppage, the reactor will not be considered safe until all nuclear fuel is removed from it, and that is expected to be completed in 2008. Fuel also has to be taken out of other decommissioned Chernobyl reactors.
The leaky concrete and steel sarcophagus, a Soviet-era monster that covers the ruined reactor 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.»
