UKRAINE: WORKERS VENT THEIR ANGER AS CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR POWER PLANT PREPARES TO CLOSE DOWN ITS LAST NUCLEAR REACTOR

Record ID: 216069

  • Title: UKRAINE: WORKERS VENT THEIR ANGER AS CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR POWER PLANT PREPARES TO CLOSE DOWN ITS LAST NUCLEAR REACTOR
  • Date: 17th November 2000
  • Summary: CHERNOBYL, UKRAINE (NOVEMBER 17, 2000) (REUTERS - ACCESS ALL) 1. WS: EXTERIOR OF THE BUILDING/ MONUMENT TO FORMER RUSSIAN LEADER LENIN 0.06 2. ZOOM OUT OF THE FOURTH BLOCK 0.15 3. SV: BARBED WIRE 0.18 4. WIDE OF FOURTH BLOCK 0.24 5. SV: INTERIOR OF THE THIRD BLOCK/ CONTROL ROOM/PEOPLE WORKING 0.30 6. VARIOUS OF EQUI
  • Embargoed: 2nd December 2000 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: CHERNOBYL, UKRAINE
  • Country: Ukraine
  • Reuters ID: LVAB7GPIZUZBMP6SO4QBE3LXD63I
  • Story Text: Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear power plant is preparing
    to close down its last nuclear reactor. As Western countries
    welcome the prospect, workers at the plant feel they have been
    betrayed and many are seeking a better life abroad.



    Despair reigns at the Chernobyl plant, located amid
    thick pine forests some 120 km (75 miles) north of the
    Ukrainian capital Kiev. On December 15, 2000, the last working
    nuclear reactor of the third block is to be shut down, closing
    the infamous Chernobyl nuclear power plant for good.

    Glum workers say they will close the station on the date
    agreed by President Leonid Kuchma earlier this year, even
    though they do not know what they will do for a living
    afterwards.

    Shift chief Viktor Kuchinsky and other workers regret the
    closure, saying it is unnecesssary and a waste of resources in
    a poor country that can ill afford it.

    "In two or three years time you'll remember my words when
    we (Ukraine) will be begging for fuel or for the money to buy
    this fuel from Russia. And everyone will say 'You who shut the
    station down yourselves, leave us out of it'," Kuchinsky said,
    pointing at the large white button that will close the
    reactor.

    Ukraine depends on Chernobyl's last working reactor for
    around five percent of its electricity.

    Workers also fear losing jobs in a remote area with few
    alternatives.

    "I would probably have to look for another job, because
    it's hard to find work in Ukraine, especially for people of my
    profession. I would probabaly have to look for one in Russia
    or abroad," Kuchinsky said.

    But the West knows Chernobyl as the site of the world's
    worst peacetime nuclear accident, when the number four reactor
    exploded in 1986, spewing clouds of radioactive dust across
    Europe.

    Officially, 31 people were killed, mostly firemen who died
    immediately after the explosion. Independent experts say
    several thousand "liquidators" -- emergency workers -- and
    local residents died of diseases caused by radioactivity.

    Thousands more suffer from various forms of cancer and blood
    disease.

    In addition, hundreds of thousands of people in Ukraine
    and neighbouring Russia and Belarus had to abandon their homes
    in a vast exclusion zone around the plant. Pripyat, the
    once-bustling 50,000-strong settlement of Chernobyl workers,
    was evacuated overnight and is now a ghost town encircled by
    barbed wire.


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