KYIV, Dec. 15 – With one flip of a switch Friday, Ukraine hoped to end 14 years of tragedy in the shadow of Chernobyl’s atomic power plant, site of the world’s worst nuclear accident.
Ukraine said it was undertaking a historic mission in closing down the last functioning reactor at the Chernobyl plant, which has become synonymous with the dangers of atomic power.
«The world will become a safer place. People will sleep in peace,» Ukraine’s President Leonid Kuchma said Thursday.
At about 1 p.m. Friday, in a ceremony at the Ukraina Palace in Kyiv, Kuchma was to issue the shutdown command through a television link with the plant 135 kilometers away.
An operator at the main control panel of the plant’s No. 3 reactor was to flip the so-called AZ switch, activating the automatic safety system of the plant’s only working reactor. Containment rods were to slide into the reactor core, bringing it to a halt within seconds.
The Soviet-made RBMK reactor has been running at 1 percent of capacity. It was restarted Thursday after a malfunction caused a shutdown. But it was considered too unsafe to be brought to full output.
That reactor is located in the same building as reactor No. 4, which exploded and caught fire April 26, 1986, contaminating vast areas in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus and spewing a radioactive cloud over Europe.
The Kremlin tried to conceal the accident and delayed evacuation of people from nearby towns for days. Firemen and other workers who were the first at the destroyed reactor had little or no protection from radiation.
Over 4,000 cleanup workers have died and 70,000 were disabled by radiation in Ukraine alone. About 3.4 million of Ukraine’s 50 million people, including about 1.26 million children, are considered to have been affected by Chernobyl.
Chernobyl has experienced numerous malfunctions since. Many Ukrainians, tired of living with radiation scares, were relieved by its closure.
For others, the shutdown represents lost electricity and lost jobs.
Kuchma, who on Thursday toured the ill-fated plant and tidy Slavutych, the town of Chernobyl workers, was confronted by dozens of gloomy protesters wearing black armbands. Thousands from among the plant’s 6,000 workers will be laid off.
«I have not seen anything better than this,» said Yevhen Laptsov, a Chernobyl electrician who lives in Slavutych. «I have two small children and we all live in this beautiful town. I’m very much afraid of the closure.»
For years, the energy-strapped government faced pressure from environmental groups and foreign leaders but refused to close the plant, citing the electricity it provided and demanding foreign aid in return. Kuchma finally pledged to shut down Chernobyl during a visit by U.S. President Bill Clinton earlier this year.
The European Commission has approved a $585 million loan to help Ukraine build two new reactors to replace the electricity produced at Chernobyl, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development was to provide an additional $215 million.
The environmental group Greenpeace called on Ukraine to honor the memory of Chernobyl victims by abandoning these plans and looking for alternative sources of energy instead.
Ukraine plans to construct a new encasing for the mammoth concrete and steel sarcophagus covering the ruined reactor No. 4. There is no decision yet on how to treat tons of radioactive dust and nuclear fuel inside, and work on making the structure environmentally safe will take decades.
It will also take years to unload nuclear fuel from the three other Chernobyl reactors.
«We shall continue to bear this,» a weary Kuchma said in Slavutych. «This is our fate.»
