Demands for $$ to Shutdown Chernobyl Called Blackmail

by Sergei Blagov and Andrei Ivanov

The week running up to last month's meeting of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and a meeting of the Group of Seven (now Eight) rich nations, was marked by bitter infighting among the plant's chiefs -- culminating in the sacking of plant director Sergei Parashin.

Nur Nigmatullin, head of the country's nuclear generating company, Energoatom, had Parashin fired in a bitter row that has set Chernobyl locals, the most ardent of the plant's supporters, against those at home and abroad who want the plant shut down.

In charge since 1994, Parashin and the residents of the town of Slavutich, populated by the plant workers and their families, say closure will put 7,500 workers out of work and leave Ukraine starved for electricity.

Yet while Parashin's dismissal boosted the supporters of closure, within days Nigmatullin had the plant's last functioning reactor fired up and generating power again. Environmentalists accused Ukraine of trying to "blackmail" the West into paying up by running the plant until the funds are paid.

Parashin has been replaced as acting director by the plant's chief engineer, Vitaly Tolstoganov, who was formerly responsible for inspection and quality assurance at Energoatom.

Energoatom said in a statement that Parashin was dismissed for opposing the "principles of industry reorganization," and rejecting Energoatom's authority. Parashin says Energoatom is poorly prepared to handle Ukraine's five nuclear power plants.

Ukraine says it wants $1.2 billion in total to set up alternative power sources and soften the blow to Chernobyl workers.

"Without the money, we will not close Chernobyl," Ukraine's security chief Volodymyr Gorbulin told the EBRD session in Kiev last month.

The first sarcophagus, built with 400,000 cubic meters of concrete and 7,000 tons of steel, has already begun to break up and plant officials warn that its collapse could release tons of radioactive dust into the air.

At the time the sarcophagus builders were forced, through lack of time and money, to use part of the reactor building wall that survived the blast, as part of the casing structure. Now experts believe that this wall runs a ten percent risk of collapse.

Scientists from a joint project between the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences, and Carnegie Mellon University and RedZone Robotics of the United States, is sending mobile robots into the sarcophagus to check damage.

Of the 200 tons of nuclear fuel in ill-fated Reactor IV on the day of the blast, only 10 tons was released into the air, and the rest is still entombed in the hulk.

That means there is still a chance of some unforeseen nuclear reaction being triggered in the sealed up wreckage, says Russian nuclear expert Alexander Borovoy. While there is no chance of an explosion, he says, the dangers of irradiation would increase.

Ukraine's primary concern however is with the only one of four reactors at the plant, Reactor III, which is still capable of running. Within days of the EBRD meeting, even as the Group of Seven leaders, plus Russia, were convening in England for their annual summit, Reactor III was restarted, reaching its full capacity of 3,200 megawatts within 48 hours.

Oleg Taranov, head of the Ukrainian committee organizing the EBRD meeting, said the reactor's reactivation had to be delayed "so as not to worry our guests (from the EBRD)."

The environmental group Greenpeace was enraged. "This is pure propaganda," Greenpeace Ukraine's executive director Andrei Kodinenko told western media. "Its purpose is to confirm the recent threat that Chernobyl won't be shut down by 2000 if the government doesn't get money from the West."

The Bank has indicated that it may lend Ukraine $800 million to complete unfinished reactors at the Rivne and Khmelnitska nuclear plants to make up for energy lost by closing Chernobyl, but delayed a final decision at the Kiev meeting.

Russia's minister of atomic energy has accused Ukraine of trying to extort money from the West. He described Ukraine's request for more money as "nuclear blackmail," claiming that Chernobyl was not much more dangerous than other nuclear stations operating in the Commonwealth of Independent States.

However the World Association of Nuclear Operators said last September that Chernobyl's third reactor -- the unit restarted this month -- is in "very bad condition" and the most dangerous of 50 reactors it inspected.

Reactor III was shut down last year to repair cracks in its cooling system's pipes. It is the only one of four reactors at the plant that can still function. One was destroyed in the 1986 explosion, another was seriously damaged in a 1991 fire and the other has reached the end of its operating life.

The official report into the accident found it had been caused by gross violations of safety rules by operating personnel and technical faults in the reactor.

However, one Russian expert has suggested that the true cause was a minor earthquake, 10-20 seconds before the explosion at Reactor IV in 1986, reinforcing the case for its rapid closure.

The head of the Center for Instrumental Monitoring of the Environment and Forecasting of Geophysical Processes, Igor Yanitskiy, says a quake measuring a minor 2.4-2.6 points of the Richter scale, was recorded by three seismic stations operated by the institute covering the Chernobyl area.

The data was only discovered years after the disaster and even then not connected with the blast.