Ukraine Restarts Chernobyl After 5-Month Repairs

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@earthlink.net>]

Friday November 26 7:26 AM ET 

Ukraine Restarts Chernobyl After 5-Month Repairs  

KIEV, Ukraine (Reuters) - Ukraine began warming up the only remaining 
nuclear reactor at Chernobyl Friday for what could be the last few 
months of operation of the troubled power plant, a top station 
official said.  

Senior engineer Olexander Yelchishchev told Reuters by telephone from 
the plant that the reactor, which takes more than a day to reach full 
capacity, would be considered fully switched on by Sunday.  

``We restarted the unit Friday at 5:22 a.m. after five months of 
repair work and expect to reach the reactor's full power of 1,000 
megawatts late Sunday,'' he said. ``The reactor is now working at 
about five percent of capacity.''  

The number three reactor is the last unit still in operation at 
Chernobyl, whose number four reactor exploded in April 1986, spewing 
a cloud of radioactive dust over Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and parts 
of Western Europe.  

Thirty-one people were killed outright and thousands were affected by 
the blast, the world's worst civil nuclear disaster. Fire and old age 
have since forced the closure of the two other reactors at the plant. 
 Ukraine has delayed the closing of the last reactor until sometime 
next year from the end of this year as agreed with Western 
governments, blaming foreign partners' failure to approve promised 
funds to complete replacement capacity.  

The head of the former Soviet state's nuclear energy authority 
Energoatom said this week that running the 22-year-old plant, which 
requires almost six months of repairs every year, would not make 
economic sense after 2000.  

Ukraine's five nuclear plants provide almost 50 percent of its 
electricity needs.  

Yelchishchev said the start of cold weather had forced the station to 
bring forward the originally planned date for restarting the reactor, 
located 110 km (70 miles) north of Kiev, as fuel was lacking to keep 
the reactor's water pipes unfrozen.  

But he said the early start presented no safety hazards.  

``So far everything is going completely normally. We are carrying out 
the usual tests but we are sure that everything will be fine,'' he 
said.  

``I am very happy we have already restarted the unit, because nobody 
knows what might have happened during the cold weather expected 
during the next few days. We have extremely small stocks of fuel for 
our boiler station.''  

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