CHORNOBYL, Ukraine — My last trip outside Kyiv as the managing director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, in charge of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, was to Chornobyl, 135 kilometers north of the capital. It was, if I counted well, my sixth visit.
It may seem an odd choice and I understand that many people do not want to go there, out of radiation phobia or simply because the tragedy is still raw and personal.
To me, it is a place of deep meaning, with global significance, and one where the EBRD is actively working to change peoples’ lives. It was a tragedy not just for the Ukrainian people but also for countless others across the world. Every time I go I feel anybody who has any say in decisions to be made on the nuclear industry should come here, so they fully measure the price of mistakes and the weight of responsibility in that particular industry.
It strikes me that my friends, in Ukraine and elsewhere in the region, if they are above 40 or so, will precisely recall what happened to them in those days, what elaborate strategies and stratagems they and their relatives deployed to cope with the unspoken catastrophe, and how they feel, to this day, about the Soviet power hiding the truth for so long. I have come to believe that the real place where the Soviet Union died was then and there, on that night of April 25-26, 1986, in the control room of reactor 4.
On this last trip I did not go to Pripyat, the abandoned city. Instead, as I have done time and again, I visited the new safe confinement, that gigantic arch-like structure that is now encasing reactor 4. It was my first visit since it was successfully slid over the reactor in the late fall of 2016. I remember how we used to ask anxiously “has it moved today?” and how much of a relief it was to stand, in the bitter snow, in front of the arch and not see the bleak silhouette of the reactor in the background.
Activity inside the confinement offers a further cause for optimism: good progress, lower radiation all around, people busying themselves to complete the installation of complex systems that will ensure the NSC’s safe operation in the future. The team is competent, enthusiastic and professional. It feels almost industrial, clinical. Once the tests and preparatory activity is over, the Ukrainian side will take over the NSC fully equipped and ready for further dismantling of the Shelter and other associated safety works.
And then I went to the other side; to that fateful control room. The contrast could not have been starker: silence, low lights, peeling paint, and completely dilapidated instruments. I could feel the weight of history, wondered how this place had looked like, thirty-two and a half years ago.
Now this is all under the New Safe Confinement. The EBRD has been managing the project account, and also given a lot of its own money to the project – more than €700 million at last count.
The exclusion zone is the place of unspeakable tragedy; yet courageous men and women work there every day, and over the next century will be continuing to dismantle and repair. There may even be new projects like large-scale solar power, a symbol of the transformation of this area.
The EBRD has played a crucial role in this project. This is why I went.
