NOTA: Chiudono un reattore [3,4 milioni le vittime nella sola Ucraina, vedere sotto] e ne costruiscono due! Kuchma voleva una centrale a gas, l'hanno ricattato imponendogli di costrire i reattori nucleari. Ma siamo matti? L'Italia ha votato contro il nucleare, ritiri la sua quota di soldi dalla EBRD. Ladri e assassini che non sono altro.

After years of wrangling, a major international bank appears set to loan Ukraine more than $200 million to complete two nuclear reactors whose energy Kyiv says it needs in order to shut down the crippled and still dangerous Chornobyl plant. RFE/RL Tony Wesolowsky correspondent looks at what hurdles the loan may still face and what it could mean for nuclear power in Eastern Europe.

Prague, 21 November 2000 (RFE/RL) -- The president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or EBRD, says he will recommend Ukraine receive a $215 million loan to complete construction of two nuclear reactors needed to replace the Chornobyl facility. One is at the Khmelnitsky power station, the other at a plant at Rivne.

But EBRD head Jean Lemierre is making his approval conditional on Ukraine meeting certain requirements.

In a letter to the EBRD's board of directors last week, Lemierre said one condition for the loan should be the introduction by Ukraine's nuclear company Energoatom of a program to improve the nuclear safety of its plants and operations. Lemierre also wants Ukraine to strengthen nuclear regulation by establishing an independent safety body, and to push ahead with reform of its electricity industry.

Lemierre made clear, too, that his bank's loan approval will hinge on prior approval by the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, of new credits for Ukraine. The IMF has stopped its lending to Ukraine because of perceived corruption and the country's slow pace of economic reform.

The 22-member EBRD board is expected to meet at its London headquarters early next month (Dec. 7) to vote formally on the loan. If the board approves, the credit to Kyiv would be the development bank's largest single project.

It will also be one of the bank's most controversial. Ukraine has argued that the new reactors are needed to compensate for the energy it will lose when it shuts down the last remaining operating reactor -- Unit 3 -- at Chornobyl on December 15. But the EBRD has been debating the project for four years amid a steady stream of criticism.

One of the most frequent charges is that the project does not meet the bank's least-cost criteria. That was the conclusion of a 1997 study commissioned by the EBRD to consider the viability of the project. The study-- carried out by researchers at Britain's Sussex University-- concluded Ukraine needed no new energy-generating capacity, and that there was huge untapped potential in improving efficiency in the energy supply.

Concern has also been raised by anti-nuclear campaigners over the safety of the Soviet-designed reactors due to be completed. Several West European countries have spoken out against the project, including Sweden, Austria, and Germany. Denmark and Belgium have also expressed strong reservations over the two new reactors, commonly referred to as K2/R4.

But Tobias Muenchmeyer, an anti-nuclear campaigner with the environmental group Greenpeace, says the likelihood of the project being halted is low. He says any final objections to the project could be raised next week (Nov 30), when the EBRD board meets to discuss K2/R4 during an informal meeting.

"This will probably be another crucial moment because there [in London], for the first and last time actually, the content of the issue, let's say -- not only politics but the content of the whole economic aspect of it [K2/R4] -- will be discussed by the decision-makers."

Muenchmeyer says a recent trip to Kyiv by Lemierre made loan approval all but certain. He says Ukrainian officials hinted to the EBRD chief that failure to approve the EBRD loan could mean a delay in shutting down the only remaining operative reactor at the crippled Chornobyl plant.

Muenchmeyer also notes that comments from the EBRD as recently as last month had suggested the bank would only be considering the loan some time at the start of next year. After Lemierre's trip to Ukraine, Muenchmeyer says the bank appears to have moved with a new sense of urgency.

"One can assume that the pressure on the EBRD was immense to avoid a further delay of the Chornobyl closure. Because, obviously, the EBRD would have been made publicly responsible for an ongoing operation of Chornobyl."

The project got an earlier boost two months ago when the 20 members of the European Commission approved a formal communication to the Commission supporting the project. The 20 commissioners urged the EBRD to fund the reactors, in their words, so "that these two reactors are completed to the highest possible safety standards."

The Brussels-based European Voice weekly says that within the Commission strong support for K2/R4 has been expressed by External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten and Enlargement Commissioner Guenter Verheugen. One of the more vocal critics is thought to be Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom. According to Greenpeace's Muenchmeyer, Budget Commissioner Michaele Schreyer and Agriculture and Fisheries Commissioner Franz Fischler have also expressed opposition to K2/R4 in the past.

The Commission has said the European Union's separate loan package for K2/R4 would be conditional on the EBRD going ahead with its loan. The EU's atomic energy agency, Euratom, is considering a $610-million loan for the Ukrainian reactors.

The cost of K2/R4 is now estimated at about $1.8 billion. Additional funding is expected to come from other foreign credits. France's Framatome, Germany's Siemens AG and the U.S.'s Raytheon are potential contractors if the EBRD-IMF loan package is approved. With nuclear power declining in Western Europe, the nuclear industry has long had its eye on Central and Eastern Europe, where public opposition is not as great as in the West.

A green light for the EBRD loan could spark new contracts in the East, according to David Kyd, a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN-affiliated nuclear agency.

"What it might do in the future is encourage other countries that have nuclear power plant projects on the books, such as Romania, to go to the EBRD and say, 'Why not us?'"

Romania would like to add one or two Canadian-designed CANDU reactors to its Cernovoda plant.

Kyd notes commercial banks are not eager to lend for nuclear projects both because of their high prices-- a reactor costs some $2 billion on average-- and the lengthy construction time usually involved. That leaves international banks like the EBRD, which draws its money from leading Western governments -- and ultimately from their taxpayers -- as the largest source of credits.

KYIV, Nov 22 - One in sixteen Ukrainians is suffering grave health disorders linked to the Chernobyl nuclear power station disaster, a senior official said on Wednesday before the plant's closure next month.

They suffer from cancer and other diseases affecting their blood, respiratory, digestive or nervous systems and will remain an ailing legacy of the world's worst peacetime nuclear explosion for years to come, Valery Pishchikov said.

Pishchikov, the health ministry official charged with dealing with the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, told Reuters that around 3.4 million Ukrainians, nearly half of them children, were still suffering from the accident.

"Today, almost 15 years after the accident, there is still a growing number of ill people among Chernobyl victims, and it is very worrying," Pishchikov said in an interview.

"Chernobyl sparked their diseases and their health is getting worse and worse every year. That trend is likely to continue for at least another 15 years," he said.

Chernobyl's number four reactor exploded on April 26, 1986, spreading a radioactive cloud over much of Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and parts of Western Europe.

Soviet officials who initially tried to hush up the tragedy acknowledged in the end that 31 people were killed immediately after the blast and thousands were affected by radiation.

SCALE OF TRAGEDY

But the true scale of the catastrophe which displaced hundreds of people and turned local communities into radioactive ghost towns has turned out to be far greater than once thought, even as the country has continued to rely on one last reactor at Chernobyl for around five percent of its power.

Following Western political pressure and pledges to help fund two replacement reactors elsewhere, President Leonid Kuchma has agreed to shut down Chernobyl on December 15.

Hundreds of workers sent in to clean up after the accident, known in Ukraine as "liquidators", had their life expectancies slashed by three to four years, in a country where life expectancy is already low at 63 years for men, and 74 for women.

Most "liquidators" are now aged between 40 and 55, and 4,000 have already died. Health ministry statistics show that their death rate is increasing.

"We've registered cell mutations, and these people develop complex forms of diseases. They need more medicines to treat complications, and better food," Pishchikov said.

He said the entire nation was getting increasingly sick due to poor living standards and poor funding of the health care system, but the health of those affected by the accident and living in contaminated areas was even worse.

"It is disturbing...the sickness rate among those affected by the explosion is 20 percent higher than the national average while this rate among children is over 30 percent higher than the average," Pishchikov said.

The rate of thyroid cancer among children and teenagers from the area was 10 times the national average, Pishchikov said.

"In 1981-1985 we did not register a single case of thyroid cancer in Ukraine. After Chernobyl, between 1986 and 2000, the number of cases of this disease has reached 1,400."

Pishchikov said the number of tuberculosis cases among those affected was 16.4 percent above the national average.

Some government officials have said that almost 15 years after the accident the state might reduce its help to the liquidators and those living in contaminated areas, although Pishchikov said the state should continue to support them.