KIEV (dpa) – The good days are over in a little Ukrainian town that owes its existence to the world’s worst civilian nuclear disaster.
Slavutich, population 26,000, is 60 kilometres by gamma ray from the highly radioactive remains of Chernobyl’s ruined reactor.
It is a nice place to live and a good place to raise children, say residents.
Slavutichers live mostly in 14-story blocks of flats with neatly swept stairwells and courtyards free of rubbish. Pavements are fairly level, the drains work and the street lighting functions.
There are four elementary schools and one middle school. Appropriately, bearing in mind the city’s nickname (Home of Energicists), the central heating here works fine.
Though Ukraine’s population fell by a full 1 per cent last year – demographically the last time things were that bad in Ukraine was during Stalin’s 1930s famines – school classes in Slavutich are jammed with 8,000 active, and mostly well-behaved children.
Slavutich has the highest birth rate and the youngest and most educated citizens in all of Ukraine, a city spokeswoman said. Drunkenness is rare. Organized crime is unheard-of.
Slavutich was built in 1986 after Chernobyl’s reactor number four went critical, spraying a radioactive cloud over half of Europe.
Fallout rendered the nearby town of Pripyat, where most Chernobyl technicians lived, uninhabitable and so Pripyat folk founded a brand- new, even more heavily-subsidized government town for Soviet nuclear scientists. They named it Slavutich.
Tiny by Ukrainian standards, Slavutich boasts its own football stadium and a yacht club. Parents kit out their kids in smart Polish winter wear. The average monthly salary in Slavutich is 166 dollars, three times the national average.
Single mothers working at Chernobyl are almost the only women in Ukraine capable of providing for a family on their own.
For 14 years life in Slavutich stayed good. Unlike the rest of Ukraine, privatization never put jobs at risk and inflation left salaries pretty much untouched.
But the December 2000 closedown of Chernobyl has ended that security. Of the 9,000 Slavutichers working at the power station around 5,000 will lose their jobs; 2,400 during 2001 alone, Mayor Vladimir Udovenko told Cegodnya newspaper.
Last year parliament made the town a low-tax zone in the hope of attracting investment and of creating high-tech work based on Slavutich brainpower. In 14 months the Slavutich Free Economic Zone (SFEZ) has seen start-ups in radiation containment technologies, roofing with a special paint on which snow won’t stick, and even mass-produced, low-cost lasers.
“The know-how concentrated here is superior,” said Georgy Sidorov, director of Slavutich´s Abris Laser Company.
But Ukraine is a poor country with an even worse reputation as a place to invest. A mere 2.3 million dollars and 246 jobs have come to the SFEZ.
“You have to be realistic,” said Hrihory Danielko, former Chernobyl engineer. “People are going to have to look for work.”
Ukraine has 800 million dollars worth of promises from western donors to repair the concrete shelter built around the remains of the blown-up reactor, so up to 1,000 will find at least temporary employment doing construction work.
Some engineers will go to the Rivno and Khmelnitsky nuclear stations, since a consortium led by the European Energy Agency and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development has promised Ukraine 1.4 billion dollars to improve those stations.
But even the most optimistic experts predict the Rivno and Khmelnitsky projects will not be up and running before before 2003; after all, to get the loans the Ukrainian government bureaucracy must build nuclear power stations to exacting European standards.
As workers wait for the axe to fall, rumours at Chernobyl are flying. Sacked employees will receive 50,000 dollars severance. A secret aircraft parts will provide new jobs. European nuclear energy will hire all the Ukrainians. Russia will create a giant think tank.
“The only true rumour is that women are going to get sacked first,” Danielko said. He’s probably right: whenever a Soviet-era factory reduces its work force, almost always the men keep the jobs.
Mayor Udovenko estimates his town will need 400 million dollars and 10 years to recover, and even then, life will never be the same.
“For us in Slavutich, the problem of Chernobyl is just beginning,” he said.
