CHORNOBYL, Ukraine — Hydrologist Sergii Obrizan casts his eyes over Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s cooling pond, a nearly 23-square-kilometer, man-made reservoir created in the 1970s to cool the plant’s nuclear reactors.
Now, almost 32 years after the disastrous explosion that in 1986 spewed radiation across Europe, the pond remains one of the most radioactive parts of the 10-kilometer exclusion zone around the shuttered plant.
But while the dead zone looks apocalyptic today, Japanese and Ukrainian scientists are studying how to revive it. The cooling pond might play a key role in the quest to make contaminated lands useful again. Ukraine has big plans for the 2,600-square-kilometer exclusion zone: a massive solar power plant worth $1.3 billion and with a 1.2-gigawatt capacity, a wildlife sanctuary and a place to store radioactive waste in a 10-kilometer area near the destroyed fourth reactor of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
Japanese scientists have their own reasons for helping and taking a deep interest in Ukraine’s problem. An earthquake in 2011 damaged the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant and caused nuclear meltdown, leaking radiation near the cities of Okuma and Futaba in the Fukushima Prefecture.
Residents were evacuated and Japan today has its own highly radioactive exclusion zone.
Joint work
The Japanese and Ukrainians are working under the project named Science and Technology Research Partnership for Sustainable Development, also known as SATREPS. This scientific initiative focuses its research on the cooling pond, investigating how radioactive contamination affects an ecosystem and how contaminated territory can be brought back into use.
“We take samples of dust and other atmospheric condensation here for further research,” says Obrizan, deputy head of the Information and Analytical Department at EcoCenter, a Ukrainian state radioecology research enterprise, and one of the Ukrainian scientists participating in the Chornobyl research.
Japan is involved in the research because it is still grappling with the effects of its own nuclear disaster when in 2011 an earthquake caused radiation at Japan’s Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant.
Japan and Ukraine signed a memorandum of cooperation back in November 2016, and the Japanese government pledged $5 million over five years to finance the research project. The financing will pay for special equipment and support the work of Japanese scientists in Ukraine. In turn, the Ukrainian side is providing labs and additional scientists.
Altogether, there are 12 Ukrainian scientific institutions participating in the project.
Different goals
The goal of SATREPS is to improve knowledge about how radioactive elements spread through a contaminated zone, as well as develop the legislative base for environmental rehabilitation and the more effective management of territories affected by radioactive fallout.
The scientists will study the migration of radionuclides — radioactive atomic particles — in water, soils and sludge.
To that end, Obrizan and his colleagues have created three drainage reservoirs in parts of the zone with different levels of radioactivity where scientists can collect the material they need for research.
While Japan plans to resettle people in the present exclusion zone around the Fukushima plant in the future, Ukraine does not intend to repopulate the Chornobyl zone.
The zone in Ukraine remains seriously affected by more dangerous radioactive contamination, which will take at least 24,000 years to decay, Serhii Kirieiev, EcoCenter’s director told the Kyiv Post on Feb. 5.
“Although the two nuclear disasters are slightly different in character, the Japanese experts want to know what will happen in Fukushima in 30 years,” Kirieiev said.
Solar plant
Vitaly Petruk, the head of the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management, told the Kyiv Post that although Ukraine and Japan have different plans on how to use their exclusion zone territories, the result produced by SATREPS would be useful for both countries.
“The Japanese government wants to return people there. The district around the Fukushima plant was a thickly populated area with agrarian land and access to the sea,” Petruk said.
“For Japan every inch of a territory is precious.”
Unlike Japan, where 127 million people live on 337 square kilometers, Ukraine, with almost twice as much territory and only 43 million people, has abundant space.
Petruk said the Chornobyl zone would be divided into a wildlife sanctuary and the zone of maximum effective economic use, in particular — radioactive waste storage and a solar power plant.
“These objects are planned to be placed mostly in the areas around the nuclear plant, where radiation levels are still high and that are close to infrastructure and power lines,” Petruk said.
The cooling pond is one such zone — the Ukrainian government is planning to drain the remaining water from the pond and set up a solar plant with a total capacity of 1,200 megawatts.
“But first we need to discover if it is safe to set up panels there, the mud at the pond’s bottom is still highly radioactive. We also need to understand how the draining of such a big pond will affect the surrounding ecosystem,” Kirieiev said.
The solar panel project is in its early stages.
In 2017, the French government allocated 250,000 euros for a feasibility study to determine which areas would be suitable for a solar power plant.
The French energy company Tractebel Engineering SA will submit results of the study to Ukraine’s Ecology Ministry and the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management in mid-February.
“Only after that we will talk about further steps,” Petruk said.
Although the memo of cooperation between Japan and EcoCenter was signed in 2016, the active phase of cooperation started in May 2017. Until December, the scientists were studying soils, aerosol particles, as well as the pond’s sludge and water. But then winter set in, and the Japanese scientists left for home.
“Now the project is on hold,” Obrizan said. “Our Japanese colleagues will come back to continue the studies in spring.”
The video demonstrates what the Chornobyl exclusion zone has to offer to the potential investors. Ukraine has big plans for the 2,600-square-kilometer exclusion zone: a massive solar power plant worth $1.3 billion with a 1.2-gigawatt capacity, a wildlife sanctuary and a place to store radioactive waste in a 10-kilometer area near the destroyed fourth reactor of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. (Courtesy of the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management)
