- Title: UKRAINE: Ukraine remembers the Chernobyl nuclear accident 20 years ago
- Date: 26th April 2006
- Summary: MORE OF SERVICE
- Embargoed: 11th May 2006 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Ukraine
- City:
- Country: Ukraine
- Topics: Disasters / Accidents / Natural catastrophes,Energy
- Reuters ID: LVAAI4XX3M47FH5DRSCAZ2XK7GYF
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- Story Text: A prayer service outside Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear power plant on Wednesday (April 26) marked the start of countrywide events on the 20th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear accident.
Orthodox priests led the religious service attended by relatives and residents of towns surrounding the power station.
Ukraine President Victor Yushchenko is due to arrive at the station later on Wednesday.
Overnight, emotional vigils have taken place in several places.
In the town of Slavutych, hundreds of people, each bearing a candle, some with red carnations, filed slowly through the streets of Slavutych, the town built to house the Chernobyl plant's workers after the world's worst nuclear accident on April 26, 1986.
Mourners placed candles at the foot of a wall bearing images graved in stone of engineers and firefighters sent to tackle the blaze.
At 1:23 a.m. Moscow time (2123 GMT) -- a minute before the time of the explosion and subsequent fire that sent radiation billowing throughout Europe -- a minute of silence was declared.
A bell tolled and alarm sirens blared.
A middle-aged man, tears welling in his eyes, shook his head in disbelief as he stood alongside younger mourners.
Yushchenko placed flowers an hour later at a church in Kiev honouring "liquidators" who died fighting the blaze or later from excessive doses of radiation.
The blast in Chernobyl's fourth reactor -- during an unexplained experiment -- contaminated large swaths of territory in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
Soviet authorities took two days to inform the world -- and their own people. They then launched feverish clean-up and reconstruction efforts culminating in the construction of a structure to house the shattered reactor about 80 km (50 miles) north of Kiev.
Estimates of the death toll linked to Chernobyl vary widely.
The World Health Organisation put at 9,000 the number of extra deaths, while the environmental group Greenpeace predicts an eventual death toll of 93,000.
Hundreds of thousands were evacuated and the United Nations estimates 7 million still live on land with unsafe radiation levels.
In the run-up to the anniversary, Yushchenko called for new efforts -- and more cash -- to build a new "sarcophagus" to replace the leaking original containment structure.
Yushchenko had told dignitaries assessing the effects of Chernobyl on Monday that a new conference of donors was needed to complete the "tomb" project launched in the 1990s.
Ukraine, which spent up to 10 percent of its budget on post-Chernobyl cleanup could never take on the project itself -- with a price tag of 800 million to 1.4 billion U.S. dollars.
Experts see construction of a new "sarcophagus" as part of a plan to decommission the station -- which stopped producing electricity in 2000 at the insistence of the international community, but still contains some 200 tonnes of nuclear fuel. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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