BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

25/01/2007

Belarus to Go Nuclear 21 Years After Chernobyl

By Yuriy Humber

Jan. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Belarus, hardest hit by the Chernobyl nuclear accident that released 400 times the radiation of the Hiroshima bomb, will expedite its nuclear power program as President Alexander Lukashenko seeks alternatives to Russian fuel.

Lukashenko demanded the country's top officials work without pause to offset the $3.5 billion Belarus will lose this year in energy subsidies from neighboring Russia. Alternative power and energy efficiency will be key to plugging the gap, Lukashenko said on a visit to OAO Naftan, the country's biggest oil refinery.

``There's no time for a warm-up,'' Lukashenko said in comments posted on his Web site. The president ``noted the necessity to make construction of nuclear power plants in Belarus more active,'' the site said.

Belarus has clashed with Russia on energy supplies twice in the last month after the Kremlin sought to make relations with its neighbor more business-like. The sides reached an agreement to maintain natural gas supplies two minutes before Jan. 1, only to begin the battle anew over oil transit fees.

Lukashenko demanded Russia pay taxes on its crude shipments to central Europe, which provoked a shut-off of the main Druzhba pipeline and a three-day standoff during which deliveries to central European refineries were disrupted.

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A new Russian policy toward Belarus, which it had subsidized by as much as $6 billion via sales of oil and gas at below-market prices, leaves the eastern neighbor anxious for its ``national safety and integrity,'' Lukashenko said.

A faulty safety test at a Chernobyl reactor in northern Ukraine on April 26, 1986, triggered the world's biggest atomic disaster, releasing 6.7 tons of radioactive material in the form of a cloud over neighboring countries and as far as Scandinavian and West European countries.

Reports on how many people will be eventually affected by the accident range from 4,000 to more than 10 times that. Ian Fairlie, a radiation scientist, estimated that of the millions of people possibly exposed to Chernobyl's radioactive throw-out, between 30,000 and 60,000 may die. The figures come from a report called The Other Report on Chernobyl, financed by the Green Party of the European Parliament and published in June 2006.

Belarus plans to begin generating electricity from its first post-Chernobyl reactor in 2012, and add a second in 2015, in a plan estimated to cost $3 billion, said Yaroslav Romanchuk, president of the Mizes scientific research center in Minsk, capital of Belarus.

``The idea is a sound one: To secure independent, long-term energy supplies,'' Romanchuk said by telephone from Minsk.

The project may hit a snag due to a lack of cash, he added. ``Atomic energy is a grand project that can happen only when there is money available,'' Romanchuk said.

Source:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aygrunp.ev0k&refer=europe

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