When the world gets closer.

We help you see farther.

Sign up to our expressly international daily newsletter.

Already a subscriber? Log in .

You've reached your limit of one free article.

Get unlimited access to Worldcrunch

You can cancel anytime .

SUBSCRIBERS BENEFITS

Exclusive International news coverage

Ad-free experience NEW

Weekly digital Magazine NEW

9 daily & weekly Newsletters

Access to Worldcrunch archives

Free trial

30-days free access, then $2.90
per month.

Annual Access BEST VALUE

$19.90 per year, save $14.90 compared to monthly billing.save $14.90.

Subscribe to Worldcrunch
Geopolitics

Destination Chernobyl? Radioactivity, Jobs And Tourism

Ukraine's leaders face toxic land-use challenges 35 years after the world's worst nuclear accident.

Destination Chernobyl? Radioactivity, Jobs And Tourism

A barrier blocks the road to the ghost town of Pripyat near the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via ZUMA Press
Andriy Olenin

KYIV — What is perhaps the best-known — and certainly, the most dangerous — place in Ukraine is referred to as the "Chernobyl Exclusion Zone." And now, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is promising major changes to the site of the worst civilian nuclear disaster in history.

More than 35 years after the tragedy, much has changed in what locals call the "Zone," but life continues. People who'd returned to their native villages after being forcibly evicted in the aftermath of the 1986 accident still live there. But life has been troubled in these specially designated towns and communities: contaminated areas are often located alongside their vegetable gardens, new infrastructure cannot be built, and there is virtually no work.

To change lives in these communities and to attract investment in the area, projects to transform the Chernobyl zone have already been designed, and are now up for approval before Ukraine's Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources.

Currently, the Chernobyl zone is divided into three zones, linked to the proximity to the reactors. The first one is 10 kilometers around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, where the catastrophe happened. The "Shelter" object and the town of Pripyat are located there. This area is called "forever lost" because the radioactive elements that have accumulated there will need at least 20,000 years to dissipate.

The second zone is a buffer zone and a zone of unconditional (compulsory) resettlement. The villages there have been evacuated, while construction and cultivation of crops, fishing, gathering berries, and hunting are forbidden.

The third zone refers to guaranteed voluntary resettlement. It has the same prohibitions as the second zone, but people live there, both locals and those who work in the Zone on a rotational basis. Residents of these communities cannot renovate their own homes, plant vegetables, get land or inherit property.

There are 10,000 hectares of wasted land

The territory of guaranteed voluntary resettlement includes 800 settlements that fall into the third and sometimes even the second zone. There is practically no work here, and business activity and tax revenue is non-existent.

In the community of Naroditsy, there are 10,000 hectares of wasted land. But they grow crops on some of them, which is both illegal and unhealthy. According to the State Environmental Inspection, 5,000 hectares of contaminated land are being used to plant crops in the Zhytomyr region alone.

Community leaders explain their actions as follows: they don't know if these lots are polluted or not, because they have no corresponding maps. To know for sure they ask to carry out studies. According to the State Exclusion Zone Management Agency, $1 trillion would not be enough to study all contaminated lands.

The transformation of the exclusion zone and the unconditional resettlement zone was mentioned back in 2015 by the then Minister of Ecology Igor Shevchenko, but it went no further. Since the 2019 election of President Zelensky, three decrees have been signed related to the transformation of the zone. In April 2021, a draft law was registered that will allow regional state administrations to grant permits for the use of currently contaminated land, after expert evaluation, to build new infrastructure facilities and to expand existing ones.

The iconic Ferris wheel in the ghost town of Prypiat, Ukraine sits abandonedVolodymyr Tarasov/Ukrinform/ ZUMA Wire

Olga Vasilevskaya-Smaglyuk, a member of Parliament and co-author of the bill, says changes and new building permits are needed for local communities to survive. "We need tourism and economic development. Tourists who go to the Chernobyl zone should have a place to eat or fill up their cars," she said. "

Caution, however, comes from members of the Parliament's main Scientific-Expert department, who say it may lead to uncontrolled use of lands and construction of new enterprises on the radioactively contaminated lands, which could of course lead to health problems.

The proposed project is divided into three phases. The first will last from 2021 to 2030 and provides for the restoration of the degraded ecosystem within a 30-kilometer zone around the Chernobyl nuclear plant and the restoration of the natural barrier function.

During this time, it is necessary to eliminate dead wood and forest fires, which account for 30% of the total area of the zone, plant new trees and transfer water sources to the nature protection zone. The territory that cannot be used for living beings will become an industrial zone to dispose of contaminated wood.

The Shelter facility requires special attention: under its roof lies the ruined fourth unit, which continues to deteriorate. It should be dismantled and buried before it starts to collapse in unpredictable places and on an unpredictable scale.

The second phase will last from 2031 to 2050. The uninhabitable part of the Zone must be turned into an open economic zone, in particular, to build the infrastructure for the nuclear fuel of Westinghouse (the company that supplies fuel to a number of Ukrainian nuclear power plants).

The territory that cannot be used for living beings will become an industrial zone.

Also in the second period, environmentalists have proposed developing tourism, to create a museum-archive of folk culture to form a regional Chernobyl scientific-information fund of ethnocultural heritage.

The third stage will last from 2051 to 2071. During this time it is planned to transfer the restored land plots for economic use, to completely decommission three Chernobyl units, and create environmentally friendly and waste-free nuclear technology.

Instead of the remaining three power units, ecologists propose to install 12 NuScale Power modular reactors with a capacity of 50 MW. The technology for small power modular reactors itself is at the testing stage. The first such reactor in the world is planned to be launched in 2026 in Idaho.

Another plan for the exclusion zone is a proposal to build a plant to recycle lithium-ion engines and produce hydrogen energy.

There are proposals to develop multipurpose testing grounds for domestic and foreign scientists, to provide comfortable working conditions for scientists by establishing an innovative Chernobyl research hub of science and innovation.

But while officials are reviewing the plans, the Chernobyl zone continues to degrade, and the people who live there are forced to violate the law: they say it's for a different kind of survival in the face of joblessness and poverty.

You've reached your limit of free articles.

To read the full story, start your free trial today.

Get unlimited access. Cancel anytime.

Exclusive coverage from the world's top sources, in English for the first time.

Insights from the widest range of perspectives, languages and countries.

Geopolitics

The Trudeau-Modi Row Reveals Growing Right-Wing Bent Of India's Diaspora

Western governments will not be oblivious to the growing right-wing activism among the diaspora and the efforts of the BJP and Narendra Modi's government to harness that energy for political support and stave off criticism of India.

The Trudeau-Modi Row Reveals Growing Right-Wing Bent Of India's Diaspora

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G20 Summit in New Delhi on Sept. 9

Sushil Aaron

-Analysis-

NEW DELHICanadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has brought Narendra Modi’s exuberant post-G20 atmospherics to a halt by alleging in parliament that agents of the Indian government were involved in the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian national, in June this year.

“Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty,” Trudeau said. The Canadian foreign ministry subsequently expelled an Indian diplomat, who was identified as the head of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s foreign intelligence agency, in Canada. [On Thursday, India retaliated through its visa processing center in Canada, which suspended services until further notice over “operational reasons.”]

Trudeau’s announcement was immediately picked up by the international media and generated quite a ripple across social media. This is big because the Canadians have accused the Indian government – not any private vigilante group or organisation – of murder in a foreign land.

Trudeau and Canadian state services seem to have taken this as seriously as the UK did when the Russian émigré Alexander Litvinenko was killed, allegedly on orders of the Kremlin. It is extraordinarily rare for a Western democracy to expel a diplomat from another democracy on these grounds.

Keep reading...Show less

The latest