Shift chief Viktor Kuchinsky and other workers regret the closure, saying it is unnecessary and a waste of resources in a poor country that can ill afford it. Ukraine depends on Chernobyl's last working reactor for around five per cent of its electricity. Workers also fear losing jobs in a remote area with few alternatives. The difficulty of finding work in the Ukraine will probably force Kuchinsky and other workers to look in Russia or abroad for another job. But it is difficult for the West to mourn the closure of the plant which was the scene of the world's worst peacetime nuclear accident, when its number four reactor exploded in 1986, spewing clouds of radioactive dust across Europe.
Thousands more suffer from various forms of cancer and blood disease as a result of the disaster.
And in addition, hundreds of thousands of people in Ukraine and neighbouring Russia and Belarus had to abandon their homes in a vast exclusion zone around the plant.