Many Western countries welcome the prospect, but workers at the plant feel they have been betrayed and many are now seeking a better life abroad. Despair reigns at the plant, located amid thick pine forests some 75 miles north of the Ukrainian capital Kiev. Glum workers say they will close the station on the date agreed by President Leonid Kuchma earlier this year, even though they do not know what they will do for a living afterwards. 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.