1995: THE YEAR IN REVIEW: The Chornobyl issue: commitments and aid (12/31/95)

1995: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

The Chornobyl issue: commitments and aid

Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma made a political commitment in April to close down the Chornobyl nuclear power plant by the year 2000, but it took almost all of 1995 for Ukraine to reach an agreement with the G-7 countries regarding financial aid and further cooperation in helping restructure Ukraine's power industry.

Although the West has long understood the importance of closing down Chornobyl - a major threat to the health and environment of Europe - only recently have Ukraine's partners realized the country's tremendous hardships associated with this effort. One Ukrainian government official pointed out in November, when a memorandum of understanding was initialed in Vienna, that in the end, Ukraine received assurances that it will not be left alone to face the problem of the Chornobyl station's shutdown.

On December 20, Ukraine's Minister of Environmental Protection and Nuclear Safety Yuriy Kostenko and Canada's Vice-Premier and Secretary of the Environment Sheila Copps signed an agreement in Ottawa that provides for more than $2.3 billion in financial assistance from the G-7 countries to close down Chornobyl by the year 2000. Ms. Coop said it was an act of political courage for the Ukrainian government to agree to the shutdown because of the economic hardship that will result.

But even before the ink was dry on the document, Mr. Kostenko said the financial aid package was not enough to cover the costs of sealing the Chornobyl site, disposing of tons of radioactive waste from dumping areas, completing the clean-up, providing new energy sources for Ukraine and providing new jobs and training to those workers who will be left unemployed after the Chornobyl plant is decommissioned.

Funds are also lacking to transform the "sarcophagus," or cover, over the reactor that exploded in 1986, into an ecologically safe facility, he explained.

Mr. Kostenko linked Ukraine's promise to shut down the power plant by the year 2000 to financial guarantees from the Group of Seven countries and international funding organizations, adding that "if one of the sides fails to abide by its commitments, the other side will have an opportunity to make decisions in its own favor, taking into account its national interests."

He stressed that the West may have to come up with even more money to make the world safe from Chornobyl, and emphasized that the agreement is not a legally binding document, but simply a first step. He added that Ukraine would make additional proposals to donor countries and international lending institutions.

The minister has proposed that bilateral agreements between Ukraine and each of the G-7 countries be drafted in the near future, in order to implement a funding mechanism, and suggested that these documents be signed in the spring of 1996, during the G-7 summit that will be devoted to nuclear safety problems.

Lack of money has been the primary stumbling block for Ukraine, which has exhibited the political will to close down the plant, site of the April 1986 nuclear accident that spewed radioactive fallout throughout Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and parts of Europe.

The Ukrainian Parliament, in an appeal to the G-7 in May of this year, pointed out that its national economy cannot finance all of the necessary expenditures to minimize Chornobyl's aftereffects on the people and the environment. It called for aid - scientific, technical and humanitarian assistance - from the international community, explaining that the problem of Chornobyl is a complex issue, and does not concern merely shutting down the plant.

Originally, Ukrainian government officials estimated that the full cost of the Chornobyl clean-up would exceed $4.4 billion, a monstrous sum that frightened Western countries from the negotiating table.

Indeed, the full price tag on the lengthy process of closing down Chornobyl is not yet known, but the commitment to go ahead with the agreement has been made by both sides. Minister Kostenko told reporters in November that "it really will cost tens of billions of dollars to cover the costs associated with the shutdown of Chornobyl, when you take into account the losses Ukraine will carry in the energy sector, the costs of providing social protection, cleaning up the environment," and so on. And, he added, "the complete shutdown will take decades."

But, Mr. Kostenko told reporters in Ottawa in December that there are 15 other dangerous Chornobyl-type nuclear power stations in Russia and the former Soviet Union which also should be shut down before they become the sites of accidents. Nuclear energy officials, such as Mykhailo Umanets, have said that there are 43 RBMK Chornobyl-like reactors working in at least six countries and nobody wants them shut down. He noted that Great Britain alone has 19 such reactors.

Earlier in the year, officials from Ukraine's nuclear industry, including Mr. Umanets of the State Committee on the Use of Nuclear Power (Derzhkomatom), and the Chornobyl plant director, Serhiy Parashin, dismissed the possibility of another nuclear explosion at the Chornobyl nuclear plant.

"The demands of the West to close down the Chornobyl nuclear power plant are not substantiated technically," said Mr. Umanets, reacting to a report in London's The Observer newspaper on March 26, which stated that a "second catastrophic explosion at the Chornobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine could happen at any time."

"The events of 1986 cannot recur," said Mr. Parashin, who added that more than $300 million had been invested in safety at Chornobyl. "This is a gimmick to put pressure on Ukraine," he added.

Both he and Mr. Umanets said they were not surprised about the timing of The Observer article, just weeks before President Kuchma had promised a final decision on the future of Chornobyl. Pressure on Ukraine had to be exerted from the West, they said.

10 years later

Although Ukrainian government officials have set the wheels into motion to shut down the Chornobyl nuclear plant, site of the world's worst nuclear accident nearly 10 years ago, the psychological scars of this tragedy are far from healing.

The consequences of this accident are still being felt today: more than 180,000 people in Ukraine have been resettled since the nuclear explosion, and to this day, thousands of Ukrainian citizens complain of weakness, headaches, poor memory and a general decline in health - as well as anxiety about the future. The New York Times recently reported that some 5 million people were exposed to radiation that spread across the region. And, according to the Ukrainian Health Ministry, the total number of deaths among victims of the Chornobyl accident between 1988 and 1994 is more than 125,000.

Officials at Ukraine's Ministry of Health have noted an increase in thyroid cancer, especially among children, since the April 1986 disaster. The World Health Organization reported that thyroid cancer among children has increased some 100 times in the areas most contaminated.

But an even greater number of people have been psychologically affected by the event of 1986, reported Dr. Yuriy Sayenko, deputy head of the Ukrainian Institute of Sociology, in a paper released last April.

"Chornobyl was the ruin of their world views, their lifestyles, their plans. It was Chornobyl that demonstrated the huge impact of a nuclear power catastrophe upon the social and psychological sphere of a large number of people - about 6 million," he wrote.

Although the governments of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia have tried to help their citizens deal with the aftermath of this tragedy, with Ukraine allocating nearly 5 percent of its state budget to pay for the post-Chornobyl social security net and for activities to neutralize the accident's aftereffects, the required funding is several times higher than the available resources.

Private groups and international organizations have been instrumental in providing aid to victims of the Chornobyl nuclear accident.

A program set up by UNESCO in 1993 has helped Chornobyl victims cope psychologically, setting up community centers - nine to date - in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia to help people who want to talk about their problems, or just spend time with people who underwent the same traumas.

As the disaster's 10th anniversary approaches, the United Nations proclaimed April 26, 1996, International Day in Memory of Chornobyl. The U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution on improving international cooperation and coordination of efforts for studying, easing and minimizing the aftermath of the Chornobyl accident, and authorizing the secretary-general to carry on activities to buttress those efforts.

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