EBRD has cancelled funding earmarked for short-term safety upgrade work on Chernobyl 3. The money will instead go towards meeting the overall cost of decommissioning the whole station.
The bank announced the move after learning that Energoatom had dropped plans to shut down unit 3 this year for maintenance. The outage is now scheduled for next year. The bank argues that the Ukrainians have failed to comply with a 1996 agreement which set a timetable for the upgrades. Under the agreement, a total of 118 million ECU ($129 million) was allocated from the EBRD-administered Nuclear Safety Account for both the decommissioning and the safety work. About 8% was for the plant upgrades. A spokeswoman for EBRD said there was no point allocating the money for this year, with no outage in prospect. Nor did it make any sense to spend the money in 1999 on a plant due to close by the year 2000.
