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| Top Stories News - updated 6:31 PM ET Dec 17 |
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CHERNOBYL, Ukraine (Reuters) - Engineers at the Chernobyl nuclear power station flicked its stop switch for the last time on Friday, officially closing the plant which became a chilling symbol of the dangers of atomic power. President Leonid Kuchma relayed an order to the control room of reactor Number Three, where duty operator Serhiy Bashtovoi turned a switch marked BAZ for ``rapid emergency defense.'' That lowered control rods into Chernobyl's last functioning reactor to begin the long process of decommissioning a plant which, in 1986, caused the world's worst nuclear accident. Western governments and environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief and Ukraine took a step away from the disaster's legacy. ``What is Chernobyl for Ukraine?'' Kuchma said during a lavish ceremony in Kiev, 70 miles south of the plant. ``It's almost three-and-a-half million victims of the catastrophe and its consequences. Almost 10 percent of our territory tainted by radiation. 160,000 people who had to leave the places where they were born and move elsewhere.'' Outgoing President Clinton (news - web sites) sent a videotaped message of congratulation, played on major television channels. ``It's fitting that while a communist government of the USSR built this unsafe plant, a free and independent Ukraine is shutting it down,'' he said. Fourteen years after the accident, the concrete-entombed, burned-out and highly radioactive remains of Reactor Number Four, which exploded after a controversial experiment, looms over a small monument to 30 firemen who died fighting its flames. Thousands are thought to have died since as a result of radiation which spewed from the reactor's burning shell. One in 16 Ukrainians, and millions of Russians and Belarussians suffer health disorders attributable to the disaster, including thyroid cancer and respiratory problems, Ukrainian authorities say. Chernobyl is encircled by a poisoned 30-km (20-mile) no-go zone, which scientists say will be uninhabitable for centuries. Lavish Ceremony Irks Workers More than 2,000 invited guests packed Kiev's cavernous Palace of Ukraine hall to watch the ceremony, including French couturier Pierre Cardin and a group of bemused-looking clean-up workers who dealt with the accident's aftermath. Seen from a ramshackle assembly hall at the Chernobyl complex, where around 100 workers watched the television broadcast, the event in Kiev seemed a pompous affair. The station's 6,000 workers now face an uncertain future and one worker cried out: ``We despise Leonid Kuchma.'' Another worker, Anatoly Fedchenko, 42, said with tears running down his face: ``What do I have to be happy about? I worked here for 12 years and now will have to leave.'' It will take many years to decommission the station and the last fuel rods are not expected to be removed until 2008. Chernobyl's Number Three reactor has, on-and-off, been providing Ukraine with five percent of its electricity. Reactors One and Two are already stopped. Two was shut after a huge fire in 1991 and One passed its expiration date in 1996. But technical glitches had forced the reactor to shut down twice in the past two weeks. It was only restarted on Friday, at minimum power output, for the benefit of the ceremony. Chief engineer Yuri Neretin remembers when he oversaw Number Three reactor's launch in 1981, a prestigious Soviet project. Now he directs a desolate complex infamous throughout the world. ``I look at this as a lifecycle. The station was born, it has lived through its lifecycle, and now we should see it off with honors,'' he said. ``The atmosphere in here was very glum,'' Bashtovoi, who turned the final switch, told Reuters just a few hours after the shutdown. ``A feeling of despair. I guess life goes on.'' Years Of Western Pressure It was only after years of Western pressure and promises of financial aid to complete replacement reactors elsewhere that Kuchma agreed to the closure. But, in his speech in Kiev, he said the country also saw it as a moral obligation, likening it to the ex-Soviet state's voluntary dismantling in the mid-1990s of its inherited nuclear arms, the world's third largest arsenal. The Red Cross and Red Crescent in Geneva welcomed the shutdown, but warned that thousands still lived on contaminated land. Italy and Germany, which this year began a long-term phaseout of nuclear power, also hailed the closure. Environmental group Greenpeace called for closures of other Soviet-designed nuclear plants, especially those built around the same notorious RBMK-1000 reactors used at Chernobyl. In Lithuania, the closure of one of those reactors, at Ignalina, had been delayed but officials said they expected to get it back on track in January. Earlier Stories
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