Cash hunt to buy $1bn tomb for Chernobyl

Cash hunt to buy $1bn tomb for Chernobyl

By Richard Orange, The Business, London Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - May 11

British negotiators will be lobbying hard this week to raise as much as $600m (£320m, e470m) for a new protective shelter for the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site ahead of a Thursday deadline. The UK election had slowed down the process.

More than 20 nations are expected to pledge money for the Chernobyl shelter fund at Thursday's donor conference in London. The UK government, as president of the G8 group of economic powers, is responsible for co-ordinating the fundraising.

Three consortia -- two French-led and one American -- have submitted bids to design and construct the new shelter over the destroyed Chernobyl-4 reactor. The 20,000-ton steel shield will be big enough to completely cover St Paul's cathedral

The original concrete sarcophagus hastily erected over the Ukrainian reactor in 1986 is dangerously degraded. The shelter, the idea for which came from US firm Bechtel, will be built within safe distance of the site and then shunted over the damaged reactor on rails.

A spokesman for the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which administers the fund, told The Business: "The election two days ago has been a problem. It wasn't really the perfect timing for the conference. You can't always get decisions done by the time you need them before an election. It was impossible to have a statement by the secretary of state saying, 'We really have to make this push'."

Due to the rising cost of raw materials, a further $600m is needed on top of the $600m or so raised in 2000 towards the cost of the shelter. The Ukrainian government reportedly only expects some $300m to be pledged at this round of fund-raising.

The conference will be attended by Hans Blix, chairman of the donor assembly, and chaired by representatives of the UK and Ukrainian governments.

The success or otherwise of the UK's last-minute push will only become apparent on Thursday when the different countries make their pledges.

The spokesman said: "We won't know before the event when country X will say, 'We pledge amount Y'. The real problem is that everybody wants legally binding security that the money will be spent properly."

The revelation last year that some $185m of Chernobyl funding had gone missing has been a barrier to raising more money. But the urgency of the work is likely to make donors overcome this.

Progress has been slowed down by Ukraine's "Orange revolution" last November, which has delayed the award of the contract by the EBRD from its unofficial April deadline.

At the 19th anniversary of the accident at the end of last month, Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko pledged to choose a project by the end of May. But the EBRD still does not expect contracts to be awarded until autumn. The new shelter is scheduled to last for 100 years.

The shelter has come under attack in Ukraine and elsewhere because, unlike some costlier designs, the shield provides insufficient radioactive protection to allow nuclear engineers to remove the dangerous nuclear residue from inside the reactor.

Only 3-5 percent of the fuel in the reactor is thought to have been released in the original Chernobyl accident. The project envisages leaving this within the reactor for hundreds of years until it is less radioactive and so easier and cheaper to manage.

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