License to Bury Chornobyl

Last Wednesday, more than fifteen months after shutting down the last Chornobyl reactor, the State Nuclear Regulation Committee issued, for the first time in Ukrainian and world experience, a license to decommission the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (CNPP). The license covers power units Nos. 1, 2, and 3, nuclear fuel wastes storehouse No. 1, a storehouse for fresh nuclear fuel, and radioactive waste treatment facilities. Work will be done by the Chornobyl NPP state special enterprise established by a presidential decree and cabinet resolution in order to decommission the nuclear power units and convert the shelter facility into a contamination-free system. Earlier, it was appointed operator of the Chornobyl NPP nuclear units. From now on, the Chornobyl NPP state special enterprise can lawfully serve its original purpose. The CNPP itself is expected to be fully closed in 2008, when all the fuel has been off-loaded from the reactor and the cooling pond to the storage place, Interfax-Ukraine reports. Before that, the plant remains a hazardous nuclear facility. Meanwhile, Ludvih Lytvynsky, director of the state research-and-engineering center for control and emergency warning systems under the Ministry of Fuel and Energy of Ukraine, told The Day that the CNPP had been prepared for decommissioning for the past six years, when the necessary project documentation was being drawn up to CNPP order. While there are no problems here, Mr. Lytvyntsky said, there are some with fund raising. “In Soviet times, there was no such thing as accumulation of money for decommissioning nuclear power plants,” the director said, “and the required fund is now only being found with documents having been drafted and now being studied, so there is no money, naturally, because there is no fund itself.” According to Mr. Lytvynsky, the experience if the outside world is that if a nuclear facility is to be decommissioned ahead of schedule, financial responsibility for this is to be borne by the government that will make up for the incurred losses at budget expense.