Ukraine Hires Western Firms To Help Close Chernobyl Plant

Ukraine Saturday appointed a group of Western firms to help it close the crippled Chernobyl nuclear power plant and build a gas-fired plant to replace it.

Ukrainian officials, keeping up a quick pace in arranging Chernobyl’s closure, announced that a consortium led by a German-based firm would design the project to shut down the plant, where a nuclear reactor exploded in 1986 and spewed contamination over much of Europe in the world’s worst nuclear accident.

Chernobyl’s three remaining reactors will be closed, one at a time, by 1999, as the gas plant is built nearby to replace the roughly 5 percent of Ukraine’s electrical production that Chernobyl provides.

In hiring the consortium only six weeks after offering to close Chernobyl, Ukraine raised pressure on the United States and its allies to help fund the project, Western analysts here said. The Group of Seven leading industrialized democracies have agreed to discuss helping underwrite the costs of closing Chernobyl at a summit next month in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Western nations have pressed Ukraine to close Chernobyl. Nuclear specialists say the plant is badly designed, and a concrete tomb that was built around the destroyed reactor to contain lethal radiation is deteriorating.

But Japan and European members of the Group of Seven are less likely to offer substantial new aid unless the United States does so - and the Clinton administration is battling Congress this month simply to retain its current levels of foreign aid spending.

Last year, the Group of Seven and the European Union offered Ukraine a total of about $800 million in grants and loans to help close Chernobyl. The United States contributed $38 million in grants to that total.

But Ukraine has said the cost of closing Chernobyl - including building a replacement plant and a new tomb for the contaminated reactor - will run to several billion dollars. Impoverished by the collapse of its Soviet-designed economy, Ukraine announced April 13 that it would close Chernobyl by 1999 if it got more international help in paying for it.

Press reports in the past six weeks have cited Ukrainian officials’ estimates of a $4 billion price tag for closing Chernobyl, “but in fact we don’t know” the cost, a Ukrainian official said.

Mikhail Umanets, chairman of Ukraine’s nuclear power agency, offered a new figure Saturday - $10 billion - for an overall effort through the year 2030 to shut down Chernobyl, build a new tomb around the radioactive reactor and clean up other sources of radiation left over from the accident and the plant’s operation, the Reuter news agency reported.