Chernobyl Reactor Back Online

The Ukrainian authorities Friday restarted the last working nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant, ignoring strong international pressure to shut it down.

Reactor No. 3 was restarted at 5:30 a.m. Friday after almost five months of repairs. It was initially running at about 5 percent of capacity and was gradually increasing its output, said a spokeswoman for the plant who declined to give her name. She would not say when the reactor was expected to reach full power.

Officials at Chernobyl insist that reactor No. 3 is safe and is free of any potential Y2K bugs - the glitches where a computer might misread the last two digits of a date and mistake the year 2000 for 1900.

Western governments and environmental groups have long urged Ukraine to close the plant, and a 1995 agreement between Ukraine and the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations said the plant should be closed by the year 2000.

"We're completely opposed to restarting Chernobyl," Ben Pearson, an anti-nuclear campaigner in the Amsterdam office of the environmental group Greenpeace, said earlier this week. "Chernobyl is probably the most dangerous reactor in the world."

The Ukrainian government says it is planning to shut down Chernobyl sometime next year. But the government says it needs $1.2 billion from the West to finish construction of two new reactors to replace the output that will be lost by closing Chernobyl.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which has played a leading role in the discussions on financing, was supposed to make a loan decision in September. But it has taken no action, and other potential lenders are expected to wait for the EBRD before they commit any money.

The Chernobyl plant originally had four working nuclear reactors. However, reactor No. 4 exploded in April 1986, spewing radiation over much of Europe. Ukrainian authorities have blamed 8,000 deaths on the world's worst-ever nuclear accident.

That reactor has been encased in a steel-and-concrete sarcophagus, and the two others have been permanently shut down. One was destroyed in the 1986 accident.

Meanwhile, workers have begun repairs on the sarcophagus, which was hastily constructed after the accident to prevent additional radiation leaks. The workers will strengthen the sarcophagus' concrete beams, working through December from both inside and outside the huge structure.

Ukraine continues to operate 14 reactors at five power plants, which supply about 40 percent of the country's energy. While some Ukrainians want to see Chernobyl and other Soviet-designed nuclear plants shut, Ukrainian authorities face much greater pressure from governments and environmental groups in the West.