Mentioning the Chornobyl nuclear disaster can elicit a wide variety of responses.
Your average Ukrainian will mumble in a resigned and stalwart fashion about the inevitability of his post-Soviet fate.
Your average Ukrainian president will begin drooling and making ‘ch-ching’ cash register noises.
Your average Westerner will for the most part drop everything and begin radiating compassion almost as blinding and nauseating as the accident itself.
Sympathy and compassion don’t hurt anyone, but they don’t particularly help either, and they tend to bring a false sense of closure to an issue that remains very much open for business.
For Americans especially, pining over the Chernobyl disaster is one of several recommended emotional outings on a tourist’s list of things to do, see, and think about in Europe.
For the trader from Chicago, the reactor’s explosion is a lesser Holocaust, almost as distant, complete with museums and memorial funds.
Meanwhile, the darn thing keeps reacting a few miles north of here, providing the country with much needed power. Except for the part that is bubbling ominously underneath a loose pile of protective gravel.
That’s not doing much besides breeding moles the size of shot-putters in the surrounding countryside. They are also mentioned in some guidebooks. Imagine if Soviet troops at the end of World War II had discovered a museum and gift shop in the lobby of Birkenau, while Nazi executioners hid behind cash registers and in the bathrooms.
If you think that analogy was confusing, consider the sober responses delivered by Ukrainians when, a few months back, the Post asked a bunch of them whether Chernobyl should be shut down. Most of them felt that a life lived in fear of fiery death and gradual genetic disassembly was quite a reasonable thing to exchange for sporadic hot water and lit stairwells (if someone could only find some light bulbs).
Shoot, they seemed sober.
I myself don’t have much time to mourn the dead or analyze the historical significance of the event, as I am far too busy writing letters home to my mother trying to convince her there is no way the reactor could ever become, er, historically significant again.
A Ukrainian diplomat stood up at a New York fundraising conference last week and offered the following assessment: ‘Almost 200 tons of nuclear fuel … that remain in an uncontrollable state under the cover … now presents the potential of a new nuclear accident.’
Some skeptics who have grown tired of the Ukrainian government playing the hapless victim in order to wheedle aid money from the West would say that this is simply a scare tactic. Thinking people would say that this is a very effective scare tactic, especially thinking people who live here.
The Ukrainian government has a plan to solve the problem that, surprise, involves handing it a pile of money. Give us $800 million, it says, and we’ll put an end to this threat of nuclear destruction. Otherwise we’ll make it worse. Besides pointing out that this is almost exactly the plot of ‘Thunderball,’ I would just like to offer the following suggestion: PAY THESE PEOPLE OFF IMMEDIATELY BEFORE THEY KILL US ALL.
No doubt there are frightfully complicated political, financial and scientific intricacies to be discussed concerning the shutdown. Fine. Let’s grab the keys to the reactor and discuss them in the car on the way to the plant.
Replacing the leaky reactor cover must be done properly and carefully, not just quickly. Fine. So have Washington recall 15 accountants and send some college graduates with lab coats to help out, just send the money today, please.
The U.S. government has decided that Ukraine’s political stability is worth $225 million a year. In the name of all that’s holy, how much is a little molecular stability worth?
Pay whatever it takes, I say, with one exception. I have no idea how much it costs to safely smother an 11-year old pile of burning plutonium, or to dismantle an aging, Soviet-era nuclear plant. But I know it costs a lot more if you include the price of several spanking new aging, Soviet-era nuclear plants to replace the one you just closed, which is essentially the government’s plan.
My advice to Western diplomats listening to heartbreaking stories about Ukraine’s crippling energy shortage: politely point out that there is enough coal buried in Ukraine for every citizen to sit at home blow-drying their hair by the light of a 200-watt bulb while watching the electrocution of the entire executive branch of government broadcast live from under the bright lights of a new, air-conditioned Republican Stadium.
When the government has proven its ability to shovel some rocks from the ground into a furnace without dropping anyone down a shaft or provoking a strike, then it will have my blessing to fool around with nuclear fission.
Ukraine’s insistence that money for new or revamped reactors be included in any plan to shut down Chernobyl should not be honored, nor permitted to derail plans for eliminating the present dangers at the plant. Ukraine has always used a convincing rationale when appealing to the West for help: ‘we didn’t ask for this Soviet nightmare, and we sure can’t afford to fix it.’ It’s a valid enough point as far as Chernobyl is concerned. So let them help; let them shut it down and fix it – fast. Ukraine’s energy planners can help sweep up.
Maybe I’m overreacting. But better me than you-know-what.
Sean Lawler is the Kyiv Post’s managing editor.
