But it may be thousands of years before plutonium contamination dissipates in an inner, six-mile ring, where no one is allowed to live. In front of the plant's main office, a large silver head of Lenin sits defiantly on a plinth, a holdover of an earlier era. These days, every worker must also pass elaborate radiation detectors, and a small black dosimeter is clipped to every lapel. Though there are a dozen reactors in Russia and Lithuania of the same RBMK design as Chernobyl, Ukraine has come under the heaviest Western pressure to close its plant for good. Unit Four was destroyed by the 1986 blast, and two other reactors have since been shut down.
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.