WORLD POWERS, spurred by the nuclear crisis in Japan, yesterday pledged €550 million to help build a new containment shell at the site of the 1986 Chernobyl accident.
Ukraine had hoped for €740 million from governments and international organisations at a conference in Kiev, marking 25 years since the world’s worst nuclear accident.
Officials at the conference were optimistic that more funds would still be found to make the Chernobyl site safe. “This is what we have been able to raise through joint efforts – and we consider this figure preliminary – €550 million,” Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich said at the end of the pledging conference.
Though the figure was short of Ukraine’s goal, European Commission president José Manuel Barroso said that when all the pledges were in, it was possible the conference’s “very ambitious goal” would be achieved.
Ministers and officials from the Group of Eight industrial nations and the European Union took the lead at the conference, saying they were ready to fund a new giant encasement over the Chernobyl reactor that exploded in 1986, billowing radiation across Europe.
The plan is to build a 110m-high shell over Chernobyl’s Number 4 reactor, which blew up in April 1986 after a safety experiment went wrong.
Delegates also expressed solidarity with Tokyo’s efforts to control the crisis at Fukushima.
Japan’s ambassador told the gathering that “under the challenging circumstances” Tokyo would not be able to pledge additional funds to the Chernobyl effort. Both Chernobyl and the Fukushima crises showed that “nuclear accidents respect no borders”, said UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon.
Mr Yanukovich said the Soviet-era disaster at Chernobyl in 1986 had left Ukraine with a “deep wound which it will have to cope with for many years”.
“Neither Ukraine nor the world community has the right to turn back from seeking answers to the questions which Chernobyl has presented us with,” he added.
Mr Barroso, describing the pledges as a “very good result”, said the European Commission had committed itself to putting up €110 million. In all, the EU bloc was providing half the funds required for Chernobyl “shelter and safety” projects, he said.
The European Bank of Reconstruction and Development said it would put up €120 million and French prime minister Francois Fillon said his country would provide €47 million.
The new structure will cover the present makeshift shelter, which is beginning to leak radioactivity from hundreds of tonnes of radioactive material inside.
The donors’ conference launches a week of commemoration in Ukraine marking the reactor’s explosion and fire.The official immediate death toll from Chernobyl was 31, but many more died of radiation-related sicknesses such as cancer, many in neighbouring Belarus.
Chernobyl has remained the benchmark for nuclear accidents. On April 12th, Japan raised the severity rating at its Fukushima plant to seven, the same level as that of Chernobyl.
Andris Piebalgs, European commissioner for development, speaking outside the Chernobyl reactor yesterday, said: “Behind us we have radioactivity that is still in here now and will be here for hundreds and hundreds of years. The shell will expire soon and our task today was to find enough funding for a new shell. Now we have the majority of the funding required.
“I am confident that the full funding will be guaranteed and, by 2015, I hope we will have a new structure to last another 100 years. But we will also need to look at what is happening inside the reactor and deal with that.
“We have known about Chernobyl for the last 25 years so there was no added urgency from what happened in Japan. Fukushima made an impact in the sense that it reminds us of the risks that are involved in nuclear power. With that in mind we will have stress tests to assess the situation at European power stations.
“The new structure here will be designed to withstand a category six earthquake and a category three tornado. Even though there is very low probability of those things happening, they must be taken into account.” – (additional reporting Reuters)