Chornobyl Arrears To Be Paid
It is planned to allocate UAH 200 million from the 2002 state budget to the Ministry for Emergencies, Civil Defense, and Offsetting the Consequences of the Chornobyl Disaster in order to pay off arrears in social payments (in most cases privileges and compensations) to those who suffered from the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (CNPP) disaster. (As of the end of 2001, these arrears constituted over 550 million hryvnias.) The government is also to earmark a considerable part of its additional 2002 revenues for enabling the ministry to further finance Chornobyl programs valued at UAH 737 million at the beginning of the current year. This was confirmed by Minister Vasyl Durdynets and chief of the ministry’s economy and finance department Oleksandr Babych at the ministerial regional session held on January 31 in Zhytomyr. The ministry is supposed to receive in 2002 a total UAH 2.144 billion from the state budget, a UAH 219 million increase over last year. Mr. Durdynets noted that top priority in funding these programs would be given to medical treatment and health care for those who suffered from the Chornobyl disaster, disabled adults and children, those who lost one or both parents, and cleanup workers, the resettlement of large families from contaminated to safe areas, and the creation of jobs for them. A social payment arrears clearance schedule has already been drafted.
Addressing the session, People’s Deputy and Vice President of the Chornobyl Union Volodymyr Yatsenko called on experts, parliament members, and public officials to make a concerted effort to prepare a well- substantiated answer to the assessment of the consequences of the Chornobyl disaster and work done by Ukraine to overcome them, which was recently reported by some Internet publications on behalf of certain UN agencies. According to him, these comments, quite humiliating for this country, in some essential points do not fit in with the conclusions of the high-profile international conference on Chornobyl problems held last year in Kyiv, especially in what concerns the necessity of resettling people from the contaminated areas.
Requested by The Day to comment on this, Mr. Durdynets said he would do so after receiving the results of an expert examination of the UN comments.
In his turn, deputy director of the Institute of Geological Sciences and full member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine Vyacheslav Shestopalov, pointed out that monitoring the ground around the CNPP had revealed tectonic faults at the depth of 300-400 meters. In his opinion, one should take into account this fact when building Shelter-2, a structure larger than the CNPP itself. He also recalled that some time ago the construction of the Crimean Nuclear Power Plant was suspended due to similar considerations and that problems like this would also arise at the Rivne NPP.
