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Conference to review

impact of Chernobyl tragedy

VIENNA: Tragic consequences on people's health and the environment of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 10 years ago will be the focus of a key conference in Vienna starting on Tuesday.

About 700 delegates from around the world, including senior politicians and nuclear experts, began arriving in the Austrian capital for the four-day meeting to discuss the impact of the Chernobyl accident over the past decade.

Heads of delegation from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, the countries most affected by radioactive fallout from the April 26, 1986 explosion, will address the conference directly, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said.

The IAEA, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency, is co-sponsoring the meeting with the European Union Commission and the World Health Organisation.

Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko and Ukrainian Prime Minister Yevhen Marchuk were expected personally to deliver statements to delegates.

Belarus, a country of 10 million people, suffered the most from the fire and blast at Chernobyl just over the border in Ukraine. Seventy percent of the radiation which swept across Europe fell on Belarus -- then part of the Soviet Union.

A conference on Chernobyl held in Minsk last month was told that former Soviet republics faced a peak in cancers caused by radioactivity in about nine years' time.

"In contaminated regions, incidences of thyroid and breast cancer and leukaemia are two to three times higher than in other regions," Belarus's Chernobyl minister Ivan Kenik said.

"Belarus has never had to cope with this and needs concrete medical help," he told the Minsk conference.

Lukashenko said Belarus, which has no nuclear power plants, spent 25 percent of its national budget, directly or indirectly, on cleanup operations.

The Vienna meeting follows three days of debate last week among international nuclear scientists at IAEA headquarters on the problems at Chernobyl and the safety of 15 Chernobyl-style reactors still operating in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania.

Western experts and delegates from the former Soviet republics agreed on the sort of measures needed to prevent similar accidents at the so-called RBMK reactors, but the main message from Russia and Ukraine was that none of this could be done effectively without one vital resource -- cash.

Viktor Siderenko, deputy minister at the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy, told a news conference last week that financial aid to deal with the upgrading of the RBMK graphite-moderated plants remained a major headache.

"The general amount of costs for serious improvements is around $100-150 million per unit," Siderenko said.

Experts estimate Western pledges so far amount to $20-30 million per unit.

Findings from the conference, as well as renewed calls for ready cash, were likely to be passed on to the leaders of the Group of Seven industrial countries who meet in Moscow on April 19 and 20 to discuss nuclear issues.

The three countries operating the plants, all strapped financially, say they cannot shut the reactors down because they depend on them for their power supplies.

According to 1994 IAEA estimates, the latest data available, Lithuania relies on nuclear power for more than 75 percent of its power needs, Ukraine around 34 percent and Russia just over 11 percent.-Reuter