ChernobylMore money for nuclear safety pledged on Chernobyl 30th anniversary

Published 27 April 2016

The EU and other global donors have pledged an additional $99 million to help secure the Chernobyl power plant, as ceremonies in the Ukraine mark thirty years since the disaster. The money will be used to construct a new spent nuclear waste storage facility, adding to the €2 billion already donated to helping clean up and secure the Chernobyl site. A new giant $1.7 billion steel structure will be placed over the nuclear reactor this year to prevent further radioactive leaks. The old concrete structure was put together after the meltdown, but experts say it is not leak-proof and that, in any event, it is beginning to show its age.

The EU and other global donors have pledged an additional $99 million to help secure the Chernobyl power plant, as ceremonies in the Ukraine mark thirty years since the disaster.

The money will be used to construct a new spent nuclear waste storage facility, adding to the €2 billion already donated to helping clean up and secure the Chernobyl site. Ukraine says it needs €15 million safely to store hazardous materials underground.

It’s an important project for the world as well as, of course, for Ukraine and Ukrainians,” said Suma Chakrabarti, chief of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the organization in charge of the project.

Yahoo News reports that the EU announcement comes as Ukraine on Tuesday marked the worst nuclear disaster in history. On 26 April 1986, a failed test, and a subsequent series of wrong human decisions, triggered a nuclear meltdown which sent radioactive radiation into the atmosphere and forced tens of thousands to evacuate their homes and communities.

For two days, the Soviet and Ukrainian governments pretended that nothing had happened at Chernobyl. Worried about their image, the two governments did not instruct people in the vicinity of the plant to evacuate until thirty-six hours after the meltdown.

The long-term consequences of the radioactive release are still being studied, and the number of people dying or being sickened by radioactive poisoning still unknown. Yahoo News notes that a controversial UN report published in 2005 put the number of dead at around 4,000.

The Soviet government drafted 600,000 civilian and military personnel – they were called “liquidators” — to respond and clean up the disaster. A UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation later reported that nearly 30 percent of those people died from radiation exposure.

A new giant $1.7 billion steel structure will be placed over the nuclear reactor this year to prevent further radioactive leaks. The old concrete structure was put together after the meltdown, but experts say it is not leak-proof and that, in any event, it is beginning to show its age.

The steel dome has been built with donations from more than forty governments. It will protect the 2,000 tons of radioactive uranium inside the reactor for the next 100 years.

A 1,000 square miles radioactive no-go zone remains around Chernobyl. All the towns and villages in the exclusion zone have now been empty for three decades.

IAEA, the UN atomic monitoring agency warned of “complacency” in nuclear safety. Even after improvements in safety following the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, IAEA head Yukiya Amano said on Tuesday that the take away from both disasters “is that safety can never be taken for granted.”