EDITORIAL: Who will face Chornobyl? (03/17/96)

EDITORIAL

Who will face Chornobyl?

Last year on April 13, President Leonid Kuchma made a political commitment to shut down the Chornobyl atomic power plant, site of the world's worst nuclear accident in 1986. His decision was hailed around the world as a act of courage, and Ukraine was given assurances it would not be left alone to face the fiscal problem of the Chornobyl station's shutdown.

As we noted in our year-end issue for 1995, it took almost all of 1995 for Ukraine to reach an agreement with the Group of Seven countries regarding financial aid and further cooperation in helping restructure energy-poor Ukraine's power industry. Last year in May, the Parliament of Ukraine had appealed to the Group of Seven for aid - scientific, technical and humanitarian - to shut down the Chornobyl complex and to deal with the 1986 nuclear disaster's aftereffects on the people and the environment. The appeal pointed out that Ukraine alone cannot even begin to think of financing Chornobyl's closing and clean-up.

Finally, at year's end, it seemed the West had begun to understand the tremendous financial hardships associated with shutting down the Chornobyl power plant. At their November meeting in Vienna, the G-7 said Ukraine would not stand alone when it confronts the Chornobyl closure. Then, in December, Ukraine's minister of environmental protection and nuclear safety, Yuriy Kostenko, and Canada's vice-premier and secretary of the environment, Sheila Copps, acting on behalf of the G-7, signed an agreement in Ottawa that provided for more than $2.3 billion in financial assistance so Ukraine could close the station down by the year 2000, clean up Chornobyl's contamination and provide for new energy sources. However, Ukraine's officials insisted that these costs would be more than $4 billion.

Now, according to a report by Reuters, both President Leonid Kuchma and Prime Minister Yevhen Marchuk have expressed doubts that the previous Western offers of assistance will be realized. And, they add, they cannot begin to act on the shutdown until the promised funds are made available. To be sure, the fate of the infamous plant has been placed on the agenda of the G-7 meeting scheduled for April - at the time of the 10th anniversary of Chornobyl disaster. But where is it being held? In Moscow!

Meanwhile, far from the Russian capital, the suffering in Ukraine, Belarus and westernmost portions of Russia goes on. In Ukraine alone, according to statistics released by the Ministry of Health, some 125,000 people have died as a result of the nuclear nightmare that is Chornobyl - as a result of diseases related to the 1986 accident. And, Chornobyl's deadly fallout continues. Birth defects are on the rise, and the World Health Organization has reported that cases of thyroid cancer among children have increased up to 100 times in radiation-affected areas. Scientists working in "the zone" around the plant have documented genetic mutations in all forms of life. Environmental and medical crises abound in the wake of Chornobyl. And then there are the energy shortages that have compelled Ukraine to employ a system of rotating power blackouts to save both energy and money.

Would it not behoove the leaders of the world's largest industrial powers, the G-7, to travel to Ukraine to see first hand what Chornobyl has wrought? Would it not be wise for the Ukrainian government (as suggested by Askold Lozynskyj, president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, during a Chornobyl fund-raising banquet earlier this year) to invite the G-7 leaders to visit Kyiv, and Chornobyl and its environs, so they could see with their own eyes a tragedy whose scope is so difficult to comprehend?

| Home Page |