Winter beginning to bite is a further complication. It's a political decision to shut it down, which doesn't meet the interests of Ukraine or the people who work here. Workers monitor the control room at the Chernobyl plant, site of the world s worst nuclear accident. Slated to close Dec. 15, it shut down early this week after a steam leak. Yevgeny Adamov, Russia's atomic energy minister and one of the RBMK designers, last week accused Ukraine of bowing to Western pressure.
Western experts disagree, citing design weaknesses that contributed to the disaster.
The poor state of the economies of Russia and other former Soviet states make changes tough, he notes, and applying Western standards in such conditions is difficult. Closing may be a symbolic victory, but the accident here also sparked calls for a more open understanding of such facilities. Western governments found that, when Soviet authorities finally acknowledged the 1986 blast two days later, they knew almost nothing about the plant's design - and could offer little help. Transparency is one lesson from Chernobyl, says Mr. Hibbs, that is still being learned. Some people feel that a few nuclear programs are just as isolated today as the Soviets were 15 years ago.