The construction of a solar plant worth $1.3 billion with a total capacity of 1,200 megawatts in Chornobyl Exclusion Zone is possible, according to the results of the pre-feasibility study the French branch of the international engineering company Tractebel Engineering SA presented to the Ukrainian government on March 19 in Kyiv.
The study was a key milestone on the road to reviving the deserted and contaminated zone of 2,600 square kilometers surrounding the power plant that exploded in 1986, creating deadly fallout that is still being calculated today in lives and environmental damage.
“Several years earlier nobody in Ukraine believed us when we said exclusion zone can be potentially attractive for investors,” Ukraine’s Ecology Minister Ostap Semerak wrote on Facebook on March 19. “The technical and economic studies prove we were right. Step by step we are moving the zone from a great absorber of a state budget and donors’ money to the place that could bring profit, a place for innovations.”
In 2017, the French government allocated 250,000 euros for a feasibility study to determine which areas of Chornobyl would be suitable for a solar power plant.
According to the plan, the Chornobyl zone is to be divided into a wildlife sanctuary and the zone of maximum effective economic use, in particular — radioactive waste storage and a solar power plant, Vitaly Petruk, the head of the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management, told the Kyiv Post in February.
Semerak said that Ukrainian government first presented the Chornobyl Solar project as a possible attractive project for foreign investors during the Canada-Ukraine Business Forum in Toronto back in 2016.
“Even despite the fact that the Chornobyl zone is located in the less sunny, north part of Kyiv Oblast, more than 60 investors from all over the world expressed interest in financing solar panels in Chornobyl,” Semerak said. “They believed in a message that a massive solar park construction in the exclusion zone is possible.”
According to the minister, after the presentation the government started looking for foreign partners known in the international market of renewables.
“We wanted professionals to study the capacities of the zone,” Semerak said.
In June, French government allocated 250,000 euros for a feasibility study of the Chornobyl Zone that took six months.
Tractebel France Executive Director Bernard Hammer told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that the Chornobyl Solar plant project is “slightly difficult” due to the radioactive contamination of 10-kilometer exclusion zone around the destroyed fourth nuclear power block.
On the other hand, the electric lines, roads and other infrastructure of the zone make it easier to create a solar plant, using the capacities of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, disabled since the 2000s.
Tractebel specialists said that it will take 17 months to construct one block of 150-megawatt solar panels in Chornobyl. There is no indication yet as to when such construction may begin.
