BY JON HILLSON
In response to continuing pressure from European capitalists, the government of Ukraine announced, again, in mid-April that it would close down the Chernobyl nuclear power plant by the year 2000.

The decision was hailed as "courageous and important" by French environment minister Michael Barnier, speaking for the 15-nation European Union.

It would be hard to find a more cynical compliment.

The pro-capitalist architects of Ukraine's crisis-wracked "market" economy were reduced to raising the threat of a new catastrophe at Chernobyl, site of the horrific 1986 nuclear explosion and core meltdown, as a bargaining chip for loans from the International Monetary Fund and other imperialist banking operations.

Possibility of new catastrophe
Since Chernobyl generates at least 6 percent of the nation's energy, the Ukrainian government has sought billions in assistance for the shut-down operation, unemployment compensation for thousands of workers who would be laid off, and construction of a natural gas power plant to provide energy.

The government already spends 5 percent of its national budget for ongoing Chernobyl clean-up operations. It is unable to purchase natural gas and oil from Russia, whose rulers demand hard currency to pay off over a billion dollars in overdue energy bills.

Europe's ruling rich responded to the Ukraine government's dilemma, and the real potential of another Chernobyl disaster, by tightening the squeeze, refusing all loans until Kiev agreed to close the power plant. The Ukrainian parliament voted in 1992 to shut Chernobyl, but reversed itself in 1993.

After Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma's announcement on the renewed decision to seal the plant, Barnier said Europe's bosses would press the governments of the United States and Japan to help with the costs of the closing.

Speaking for the Group of Seven, the exclusive club of the world's major capitalist powers, Canadian legislator William Chambers said a natural gas power plant "is pretty much a condition" assumed in the decision to terminate the Chernobyl operation.

More deaths acknowledged
Meanwhile, the facility's two surviving reactors keep chugging away, each in dilapidated condition, while the nuke destroyed in 1986 houses massive amounts of lethal plutonium waste. The ruined chamber is entombed in a concrete sarcophagus, which scientists worldwide contend is another accident waiting to happen. A fire destroyed an adjacent reactor several years ago, collapsing part of its roof and leaving it beyond repair.

These conditions are all the more chilling in light of an April 25 announcement, on the eve of the anniversary of the 1986 disaster, by Ukrainian health minister Andrei Serdyuk.

Some 125,000 people died from illness contracted from the huge radiation cloud the Chernobyl blast spewed across Ukraine, Belarus, other parts of the former Soviet Union, and sections of Europe, Serdyuk stated.

Previously, the most commonly quoted official figure was 7,000 deaths.

Anniversary marked by protest
The government found the highest rate of fatalities among children, pregnant women, and rescue and clean-up workers - many of them Soviet soldiers.

Hundreds of these despondent former troops began killing themselves several years ago, as treatment for their diseases - along with other benefits promised by the Gorbachev and Yelstin governments - failed to materialize.

The Ukrainian Health Ministry also reported a 16 percent increase in the death rate in the country's northern region, where Chernobyl is located.

At a memorial service at the Moscow graveyard where the first 27 Chernobyl victims are interred in lead coffins, Vyacheslav Grishin, chairman of the 300,000-member Russian Chernobyl League, stated the final toll from the nuclear catastrophe has yet to be reached. The League brings together Russians involved in the Chernobyl clean-up.

"Doctors expect the peak of oncological diseases [cancers] in those people [exposed to radiation] in the second decade after the disaster," Grishin explained at the tombstones.

In Moscow and Kiev, opponents of nuclear power mounted protests to mark the anniversary of the nuclear calamity.

Jon Hillson works at a Twin Cities, Minnesota, chemical plant.  
 
 
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