16 | MANE ENERGY | JANUARY 2019
NEW POWER PLANT OPENED AT CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR SITE
Just over thirty years on from the catastrophic nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine, opens its first solar plant in the abandoned area around the former nuclear power station. The defective reactors explosion in 1986 sent radioactivity into the atmosphere which created a cloud over the most of Europe which left Ukraine with land that could no longer be lived in.
Over 100,000 people were evacuated from a 1,000 square-mile exclusion zone, turning the town of Pripyat into a ghost town. Since 2000, the power plant at Chernobyl has been inactive, the nuclear reactors continued to operating for another fourteen years after the disaster. For last twenty years the plant had been completely inactive - until October this year.
Two years ago, companies came together to propose a solar farm in Chernobyl. They believed due to the fact most of the infrastructure is still
in place from the previous nuclear plant,all a
company would have to do is hook up the solar
panels to the new power grid to reach
its full potential.
The solar panels were installed extremely near
to the reactor that melted down in 1986. The
farm itself is estimated to have cost around
$1.2 million and supplies 1 megawatt of power to
the country which is said to be able to supply electricity for around 2,000 homes. The old nuclear plant provided around four thousand megawatts of power, so it is only producing a fraction of what it was doing previously. However, there are plans to increase production to around 100,000 megawatts in the future.
The new solar panel plant is a much needed source of electricity for Ukraine, which will aid in the country becoming more energy-independent.