Ukraine opens new waste site at Chernobyl

KYIV, Ukraine – Ukraine’s president on Monday unveiled a new nuclear waste repository at Chernobyl, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster that unfolded exactly 35 years ago.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Chernobyl together with Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and vowed to “transform the exclusion zone, as Chernobyl is referred to, into a revival zone.”

“Ukraine is not alone, it has wide support (from its) partners,” Zelenskyy said. “Today the new repository has been put into operation and it is very important that today a license to maintain the new repository will be obtained.”

The Ukrainian authorities decided to use the deserted exclusion zone around the Chernobyl power plant to build a place where Ukraine could store its nuclear waste for the next 100 years.

Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl power plant 65 miles north of Ukraine’s capital Kyiv exploded and caught fire deep in the night on April 26, 1986, shattering the building and spewing radioactive material into the sky.

Soviet authorities made the catastrophe even worse by failing to tell the public what had happened – although the nearby plant workers’ town of Pripyat was evacuated the next day, the 2 million residents of Kyiv weren’t informed despite the fallout danger. The world learned of the disaster only after heightened radiation was detected in Sweden. More than 600,000 people took part in fighting the consequences of the disaster. Thirty plant workers and firefighters died within the first few months after the accident.