nuclear-news

It was when the tree fellers arrived in early 2009 with their bulldozers that Nikolai Ulasevich, a local activist, knew the game was up.

There might not have been a published order to build an atomic power station in the fields overlooking his homestead in the village of Vornyany – but a decision had clearly been made. In authoritarian Belarus those decisions rarely have a reverse gear.

In the years that followed, Ulasevich watched as the gigantic cooling towers and system blocks of Belarus’s first nuclear power station took shape. Construction, which was led by the Russian state nuclear agency Rosatom, would be far from straightforward. A string of incidents delayed its opening, but the first reactor is finally due to go online early 2020.

To say the construction of the Belarusian nuclear plant has been controversial would be to trivialise the history of these lands.

Chernobyl lies only seven miles from Belarus’s southern border, and the nuclear accident, still the world’s worst, has left the deepest of scars locally. The direction of the wind in spring 1986 – and the Soviet authorities’ decision to avoid major harm in Moscow – meant Belarus suffered more than any other region in the union. At the moment that the radioactive clouds moved towards the capital, air force pilots were ordered to chase down the toxic clouds and seed them with jets of silver iodide.

Much of the southernmost region of Homel remains seriously contaminated, with elevated oncology levels as a result.

Any local over 50 can recall what they were doing on those dry, spring-summer days. They talk about the tiredness; the strange, dryness of the mouth; the rumours that it might be a good idea to take iodine, but the lack of reliable information. They will also tell you about a cloud of secrecy almost as harmful as the black cumulus masses that had their radioactive bowels emptied over southern Belarus. ……..

“The thought of what happened back in 1986 can’t fail to make you anxious about what may happen. You know they may not tell you the whole truth.”

Lithuania, the European nation that borders Belarus just 10 miles west of Astravets, is bitterly opposed to the nuclear plant. It says it has not been properly consulted and claims the plant breaches post-Fukushima distance guidelines – in particular, a recommendation that nuclear power stations should not be built closer than 100km of major conurbations. The new nuclear plant lies just 30 miles east of the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius.

The Lithuanians say they are preparing for any eventuality: from stockpiling iodine tablets to opening up nuclear bunkers and issuing survival notes to their citizens. In October, authorities ran a major preparedness operation, imitating a disaster response to a nuclear meltdown. The drills were knowingly hyperbolic. But several reported incidents do give pause for thought.

From what we know, the reactor vessel in Belarus has already been involved in at least two accidents. The first was in July 2016, when it was apparently dropped from a crane during installation. Belarusian authorities took weeks to admit a “minor” incident. Five months later, a replacement reactor vessel collided with a railway pylon while being transported. At least five workers have died in construction accidents. There was at least one fire incident in the control room.

The outside world would likely have stayed little the wiser were it not for the opposition activist Ulasevich monitoring from his modest home, which he shares with his wife, a few chickens and sheep, three miles away from the new power station. He said he found out about the dropped reactor vessel in conversation with a local construction worker.

“He swore that he saw it break free of ropes at a height of two or three metres,” he says. …….

Yury Voronezhtsev, the man who led the official Soviet official response to Chernobyl, says he could not believe any statement that the plant was “safe”.

“I don’t believe that our Belarusian construction workers are any better than the Soviet ones,” he tells The Independent. “We have the same people, and the same systems………. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/chernobyl-belarus-nuclear-power-station-atomic-vornyany-rosatom-ostrovets-astravets-a9271811.html