Meltdown.

The worst industrial accident ever to befall humanity left a wound that has not healed with time. Now, the nuclear power industry appears to be wearing out its welcome on the planet - and opening the door wider to renewables.

Ten years ago, a new word - "Chernobyl" - suddenly entered the vocabularies of people all over the world. Whether they spoke Russian, Swedish, English, Japanese, or any of scores of other languages, the word came into their language and had a chilling effect. Across thousands of kilometers, the spreading news of an "accident" at a nuclear electric power plant in the Ukraine was accompanied by a spreading cloud of radioactive dust - and with that physical cloud came a psychological one. As the magnitude of the accident became apparent, the futures of millions of people darkened. Over the days and years that followed, thousands would die unexpectedly, millions would suffer from painful or debilitating ailments, and hundreds of millions would be given a sobering new perspective on the risks of powerful technologies. Many women in Ukraine and Russia would have babies with appalling defects, and many more would decide never to have babies at all.

The chill of this event - considered by some to be the most tragic accident in history - affected not only personal prospects but industrial ones: it brought the fast-growing nuclear electric industry to a virtual freeze, from which it is now apparent that the industry will probably never recover. If Chernobyl had proven to be an anomaly, the chill might eventually have lifted. But the event has been followed - and, indeed, was preceded as well - by mounting evidence that the huge investments societies have made in this industry have been a mistake.

At the time of the accident, on April 26, 1986, about 160 nuclear power reactors were under construction around the world - with the pace expected to accelerate. But ten years later, by the winter of 1996, the number of reactors being built had dropped to 34 - the fewest in 30 years. Not a single plant was being built - or planned - in the United States. The plants under construction have a total capacity of 27,000 megawatts - equal to less than 1 percent of the world's total installed power capacity. That compares with more than 520,000 megawatts of capacity from other sources under construction. Once, nuclear power was expected to rescue the planet from the heavily polluting and now climate-altering fossil fuels, but instead it is the nuclear knight that is falling by the wayside.

Moreover, even as those 34 new nuclear plants are being built (many of them in developing countries desperate for new capacity at any cost), a total of 84 reactors have already been shut down - most of them prematurely. With shutdowns now nearly matching new startups, the world's total nuclear capacity has flattened - showing an increase of less than one percent per year since 1990.

A telling sign of what this means for the future was a comment made by Ivan Selin, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, when he announced that he was leaving that position last April to work in the private sector. Passing up the usual "revolving door" opportunity to accept a lucrative position in the industry he had been regulating, Selin said he was going into business building gas turbine power plants in Asia. His explanation for the shift: "I'm not predicting that the nuclear industry will pick up."

It is noteworthy that the decline of this industry began well before Chernobyl; the accident was not a one-shot catastrophe but a galvanizing of doubts that had persisted at least since the lesser - but still foreboding -

accident at Three Mile Island, in the populous eastern United States, in 1979. In fact, the nuclear industry has been beset by problems since its inception - problems now believed to be endemic to the technology.

Equally noteworthy is that as nuclear power has faltered in its intended role as an eventual replacement for coal and oil, the renewable sources - wind and solar - have boomed. And, while still very small in absolute terms, their rate of growth is 20 to 50 times that of nuclear. The challenge now is to shift the investment priorities of governments, which have heavily subsidized nuclear power to keep it going despite the mounting risks of new catastrophes.

At 1:23 AM on April 26, 1986, as Soviet nuclear operators were conducting a routine low-power experiment at the #4 reactor at the Chernobyl power station, a not-uncommon mishap - a combination of design flaws and operator error - resulted in a sudden power surge by the reactor. The surge, however, did not trigger an automatic shutdown as normally should have occurred, and the reactor blew up. A few seconds later, a second explosion destroyed part of the building and threw hot and highly radioactive pieces of the reactor core into the air. Burning graphite landed on nearby buildings, igniting fires.

Initially, Soviets authorities denied that any accident had occurred, despite high radiation readings recorded at monitoring stations 2,000 kilometers away in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe. The initial cover-up was short-lived, but sewed confusion and, over the years, led to intense debates about what exactly had happened. Although uncertainty still remains regarding the details of the actual accident and its impacts, it is becoming increasingly clear that unlike most catastrophes, which with time see an end to suffering and dislocation, the costs of the Chernobyl accident continue to grow with each passing year.

TOO COSTLY FOR THE MARKET

Nuclear power was born and nurtured by governments in the three decades following World War II, only to be rejected by markets in the last two decades. The demise has been especially rapid in countries where governments have allowed other energy sources to provide real competition.

In the United States, it has been 23 years since a U.S. reactor order was placed that was not subsequently canceled (the last was in 1973), and 18 years since an order of any kind has been placed. In the 1970s and 1980s, utilities not only stopped placing new orders but began canceling existing ones. Since then, some 120 U.S. nuclear reactors have been canceled. In fact, more nuclear capacity has been canceled in the United States in the last 30 years - some 132,000 megawatts' worth - than the total capacity that exists in the country today. A 1996 poll of utility executives found that only 2 percent would even consider ordering a new nuclear power plant. With competition growing in its electric power sector, the United States is likely to see a gradual phase-out of its remaining reactors. The New York investment house of Shearson Lehman Brothers predicted in 1993 that for economic reasons, 25 of the current 110 U.S. reactors would close prematurely by the year 2003.

In the United Kingdom, a similar turnabout has occurred. The first shift came in 1989, when the government was forced to pull nuclear power from its plan to privatize the nation's electric power industry. (Ironically, just one day prior to the announcement, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had delivered a UN speech lauding the critical importance of nuclear power.) But as the books were opened on the nuclear industry in preparation for privatization, it became clear that the government had lied to itself as well as to the British public; generation costs turned out to be about double what the government had claimed.

A second shift came in 1995, when the government tried again to sell the nuclear industry to investors. In a move designed to gain investors' confidence and capital, British Energy, plc, the soon-to-be private company, announced in December 1995 that it was dropping all plans to build additional reactors. According to the Financial Times, "No new nuclear power stations are likely to be built in the UK for a couple of decades, if ever." The last reactor built in the United, Kingdom, called Sizewell B, was completed in 1995 at a cost of some $3,000 per kilowatt of capacity - nearly 10 times more than it costs to build a gas-fired plant.

In France, where nuclear power is the dominant power source, it has taken longer for the true costs to come to light. Until quite recently, nuclear advocates pointed to France as an example of a highly successful nuclear industry - boasting some of the lowest electricity prices in Europe. Such assertions, however, do not hold up once pre-tax prices are compared. In a comparison of 11 European Union countries in 1995, French residential electricity prices turned out to be the fifth highest. Denmark, Greece, Ireland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Luxembourg all had lower rates (see graph, page 29). Furthermore, France's prices (along with those of the United Kingdom) have seen the smallest decrease among Union countries since 1985. Another 1995 survey found that for large commercial and industrial users, France's electricity prices ranked seventh most expensive of 16 industrial countries.

In fact, the French nuclear industry has been so heavily supported by direct and indirect government subsidies that in 1992, the OECD's International Energy Agency called for France to raise its electricity prices to bring them in line with production costs - a request that went unheeded. Another assessment, conducted for the Dutch government, found that once the subsidies are included, the cost of nuclear power in France is 30 to 90 percent more expensive than official claims. The high hidden cost of nuclear power has left France's state-owned electric utility, Electricite de France (EdF), carrying an estimated debt of 145 billion francs ($29.6 billion) -a serious burden to the French economy.

Even in Asia, where nuclear power has found its strongest foothold in recent years, the industry has begun to stumble economically. In South Korea, which has the world's largest ongoing nuclear construction program, completion costs for plants currently under construction are expected to be nearly double those of existing plants.

In Taiwan, the state-owned electric utility rejected two bids to construct a new nuclear power station, from Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) and from Westinghouse bidding jointly with Nuclear Electric, plc, stating that they were priced more than 20 percent too high. Plans for new reactors were frozen indefinitely, and the state-owned utility's vice president said that the likelihood of building additional reactors in Taiwan is not certain. Meanwhile, in China, nuclear power is estimated to be four times as costly as producing electricity from coal. While the burning of Chinese coal poses a looming threat to the planet's environmental and human health (it is dauntingly abundant and cheap), it now appears that there's little likelihood that nuclear power will provide any of the hoped-for relief.

In 1986, as part of their cover-up, Soviet officials said that total damages would reach between $3 billion and $5 billion. As it turned out, the evacuation effort alone cost more than that, and official figures now say the first three years of cleanup ran to $19 billion. By the late 1980s, the Soviet government was estimating that by the year 2000, the price tag would reach $120 billion. But staggering as these figures are, they are lower than non-governmental estimates. An assessment by the Research and Development Institute of Power Engineering in the former Soviet Union concluded that the cost of Chernobyl (including lost electricity production from plants closed in the wake of the accident) will reach $358 billion - 100 times the amount originally announced. Because this cost is also many times greater than the value of all the nuclear electricity that had ever been generated in the USSR, the report concludes that the Soviet economy would be far better off if nuclear reactors had never been built.

For Belarus and Ukraine, such an assessment is clearly accurate. In 1995, Belarus claimed that it spent some 25 percent of the country's national income on alleviating the effects of Chernobyl, and in 1996, the country calculated that its bill from the accident would reach $235 billion by 2015. Ukraine, which has been allocating only 4 percent of its annual budget to Chernobyl-related problems, maintains the figure would rise to 20 percent if the resources were available.

DOGGED BY TECHNICAL PROBLEMS

Nuclear power plants around the world have been bedeviled by technical problems necessitating costly repairs. Over the decades, it has become clear that the problems are endemic. No matter how much money is spent on them - whether in the former Soviet Union, France, or the United States - each year has brought a new log of cases in which components failed, cracks appeared, or systems had to be shut down for unscheduled overhaul. Safety regulators have been hard pressed to keep aging reactors operating safely.

French plants, which use pressurized water reactors, and were once touted for being "economically" built in standardized fashion, have been hit by the discovery that some of those standardized features were badly flawed. The virtues of standardization have turned into a plague of generic problems. Faulty steam generators and cracked reactor vessel heads (which are at the top of the pressurized container where the control rods enter the nuclear core) are being replaced at most of the plants in France, at heavy cost. At one point in the fall of 1991, no fewer than 23 of France's 56 operating reactors were shut down due to technical faults, leading to fears of power shortages in a country that normally is considered to have some 10,000 megawatts of excess nuclear capacity.

Other countries using pressurized water reactors (which make up more than half the world's nuclear stock) have also found cracks in reactor vessel heads. Engineers are concerned that should the cracks rupture, a reactor could no longer be safely shut down. If the cracks should lead to a rupture of the vessel head, operators would not be able to immediately stop the nuclear reaction. And if the vessel head failure occurred during an accident requiting the reactor to be shut down, the result could well lead to a meltdown and another Chernobyl-scale catastrophe. Countries whose reactors are experiencing such cracking include Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.

Many of the technical problems dogging nuclear plants, like the glandular or circulatory problems in aging people, become more troublesome - and riskier - as the plants get older. In Japan and Sweden, researchers have found increasing rates of problems with reactors that have passed 20 years and 15 years of operation, respectively. Given the constant heating and cooling a reactor goes through, and the intense radioactive bombardment some of its metals are subjected to, such deterioration can hardly be surprising. It now seems clear that most reactors will never last for the 40 years of commercial life originally expected of them.

Even newer plants, however, have suffered persistent technical difficulties. China's two French designed plants, which began generating electricity in 1993 and 1994, have been plagued with operating problems. Last year, both plants had to be shut down because of defects in the rod guides - one of them for more than six months. The embarrassment also led to delays in the opening of another new reactor in France.

In the first few years following the accident at Chernobyl, the Soviet government admitted to only 31 deaths, though some 135,000 people were evacuated from their homes. Two years ago, however, the Ukrainian government reported that in fact, more than 8,000 of the young workers involved in the clean-up had died, with an additional 12,000 badly irradiated. By the end of 1995, according to the United Nations, about 375,000 people in the three surrounding republics had been displaced. Even so, about 3 million children still remain in areas considered to be contaminated zones.

ACCIDENTS WAITING TO HAPPEN

Because the memory of Chernobyl is so singularly vivid, it tends to obscure the fact that serious nuclear accidents are a regular occurrence around the world. Whether a fire at Bulgaria's Kozloduy nuclear plant (a facility deemed among the world's most dangerous by the U.S. Department of Energy), or the "disappearance" of a 3-foot, 130 pound crane into an area near the core of the Welsh reactor of Wylfa, nuclear accidents repeatedly raise the risk of releasing radioactive materials into the biosphere, with potentially disastrous consequences. Unfortunately, governments and utilities often attempt to keep such incidents from the full view of the public.

Even the advanced nuclear program of Japan has yielded a plethora of accidents. In February 1991, at the Mihama 2 pressurized water reactor, a steam generator tube ruptured, forcing the first use of an emergency cooling system in Japan. Public confidence was weakened by inconsistent statements from utility and government officials, and two days passed before the government admitted that radiation had escaped from the site. Eight months later, at a Fukushima plant, an emergency cooling system was once again forced into operation following an operator's error. Tokyo Electric Power Company officials did not admit that the emergency system had been activated until challenged by journalists.

In December, 1995, Japan's plutonium-fueled Monju fast-breeder reactor suffered a serious accident in its secondary cooling system, releasing two to three tons of explosive sodium into the reactor's inner works. So severe was the accident that officials had to request help from overseas to clean up the sodium, which ignites upon contact with oxygen - a trait that could have led to a devastating fire at the plant. The plant's operator, the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC), admitted that its technicians waited an hour and a half to shut down the reactor following the accident because the event did not occur in a way described in their operating manual.

The PNC also released a four-minute video supposedly showing the damage done, and stated that no other footage existed. A few days later, however, it released another 15 minutes of tape showing the full extent of the damage. The company explained that it had not released the full tape at first because "some of the footage was thought to be too provocative to be shown publicly." In an effort to stem public outcry, the government assumed control of the accident's investigation from the PNC. The official who blew the whistle on the cover-up is reported to have committed suicide in mid-January 1996.

Even more worrisome is the safety record in developing countries. India's program, for example, has been blitzed by accidents. As Molly Moore of the Washington Post reported in 1995, "Four decades after India launched a full-scale nuclear power program to push the energy-hungry nation into the modern era, it operates some of the world's most accident-prone and inefficient nuclear facilities. During 1992 and 1993, its most recent two- year monitoring period, the Indian government reported 271 dangerous or life-threatening incidents, including fires, radioactive leaks, major systems failures and accidents at nuclear power and research facilities. Eight workers died in that period."

Only belatedly have the former Soviet states and western governments jointly sought to uncover the full extent of Chernobyl's impacts on health - not only in the immediate area of the accident but over an area of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. In Belarus, whose border is 50 kilometers north of the plant, they have found the incidence of thyroid cancer to be 285 times the pre-Chernobyl level. In the contaminated areas of Ukraine, they have found illnesses of all kinds at a rate 30 percent above normal. They have found evidence of retarded mental development and deviations in behavioral reactions among children from Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine who were exposed to radiation in utero. Meanwhile, 38 percent of the Russian "liquidators" - the young soldiers who were brought in to build a concrete sarcophagus over the monster - now suffer from diseases, according to the Ministry of the Russian Federation for Civil Defense, Emergencies and Elimination of Consequences of Natural Disasters. Psychological disorders have increased sharply among civilians and workers.

Still, the health impacts of Chernobyl will never be entirely determined, partially due to the early, organized cover-up by the Soviet government and the lack of a complete register of the 800,000 or more people who participated in the initial clean-up campaign, as well as of the millions of civilians who were exposed to higher than normal levels of radiation.

WHAT TO DO WITH THE WASTE?

More than 50 years following the first controlled nuclear reaction, governments and scientists have yet to find a safe and permanent method for disposing of radioactive waste. Such a method would have to be one that could provide stable isolation for tens of thousands of years, in order to eliminate the risk of inflicting severe biological damage on future generations and ecosystems.

It is now clear that geologic burial cannot guarantee that these materials will remain sealed off from the biosphere. The plans proposed so far have been found to be vulnerable - over time - to one kind of disruption or another, ranging from chemical bursting of containers to the corrosive and contamination-spreading action of groundwater.

Meanwhile, public confidence in the institutions responsible for handling nuclear waste has eroded so badly that even the study of a location as a potential site brings people to the streets in protest. So controversial was the attempted siting of underground nuclear waste research laboratories in France, for example, that the French parliament passed a law in 1991 prohibiting the government from selecting a high-level nuclear waste site until 2006 at the earliest.

In other countries, local people repeatedly have resisted attempts to set up nuclear waste facilities. Residents of the Swiss Canton of Niedwald rejected siting a low level waste repository in Wolfenschiessen. And in South Korea, a plan announced in December, 1994 to store wastes on a small island off the west coast was canceled eleven months later in the face of unstable geological conditions and public opposition.

Compounding the apparent intractability of the disposal problem is the rising cost of dismantling old plants - costs that sometimes exceed that of building plants in the first place. For instance, the Yankee Rowe reactor in western Massachusetts, which cost $186 million (in 1995 dollars) to build in 1960, will cost an estimated $306 million to dismantle. Germany has had a similar experience with the 100 megawatt Niederaichbach plant in Bavaria, which cost about DM 230 million ($160 million) to build in 1972, but DM 280 million ($195 million) to dismantle.

No one has yet solved the question of what to do about the millions of hectares of heavily contaminated land, the radioactive Kiev Reservoir, or the hundreds of shallow burial pits of uncategorized nuclear waste that litter the area. Ukrainian officials claim that more than 335 million tons (more than 1 billion cubic meters) of radioactive waste remains within the 30-kilometer exclusion zone around Chernobyl in which human habitation has been prohibited. Similarly, 185 tons of nuclear fuel and 35 tons of radioactive dust are contained in the crumbling sarcophagus, the huge concrete coffin that houses the destroyed reactor.

A new, more secure sarcophagus will have to be built before the existing one collapses. One 1995 estimate by a consortium of British, French and German companies puts the cost of erecting a new container at $1.6 billion. If the existing structure collapses, another cloud of radioactivity would drift away from the reactor - though it would not have the global reach of the earlier cloud. Some experts also worry that a collapse would destroy buildings necessary for the controlled operation of the neighboring - and still operating - reactor #3. A failure of the sarcophagus could trigger another accident on the scale of the original Chernobyl catastrophe.

A GLOBAL CONSENSUS

Almost universally, decisions to develop nuclear power have provoked political backlashes - indicating that we may be entering a period when fewer and fewer nuclear power plants will be left in operation.

Public resistance has been strongest in Western Europe, where the debate is usually not whether to build more nuclear plants, but how soon to close the existing ones. In November 1994, the Dutch parliament voted to reject industry requests to extend to 2007 the operating license of that country's only large nuclear plant. The 449 megawatt Borselle reactor is now expected to close by the end of 2003 at the latest. The new Swedish government, when elected in 1994, vowed to close one of its existing 12 reactors during its four-year term in office, a pledge that has reignited the debate surrounding that country's parliamentary decision in 1980 to completely phase-out nuclear power by 2010.

In Germany, with 19 operating nuclear reactors, nuclear opposition has flourished during the past decade, halting any plans for further nuclear construction projects. In the western part of Germany, as in the United States, no new nuclear plants have been ordered since the mid-1970s, and currently no additional plants are under construction anywhere in the country.

Several German state governments and the Social Democrats, the major opposition party in the federal parliament, are opposed to the expansion of the nuclear power industry and call for phasing it out, but the Christian-Democratic government continues to support it despite its numerous setbacks. The deadlock resulted in the 1989 abandonment of the partially built Wackersdorf reprocessing facility in Bavaria, and the permanent closure of the new, never operated, Kalkar breeder reactor in 1991. In 1995, a Dutch company announced plans to convert the Kalkar plant into an amusement park.

In Japan, public opposition has been so intense that the country's nuclear industry has obtained only two new sites for building reactors since the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. As a result, of the 75 to 80 locations deemed fit by the government for nuclear power plants, nuclear fuel facilities, and radioactive waste storage facilities, three-fourths have been blocked from development by public opposition, particularly from local communities. Plans to install a plant in Kochi in southern Japan, for example, were scrapped in early 1989 when an anti-nuclear slate was swept into office in local elections. And the opposition to nuclear power has also been gaining strength in those areas where reactors already exist. In December 1995, the Kyushu Power Company announced it would no longer attempt to gain permission to build a third nuclear reactor at Kushima in Mizazaki Prefecture because of public opposition. In five other towns containing potential sites, citizens have voted to require public referenda on nuclear questions.

Japan's official goal of having 80 reactors by 2010 is looking increasingly unrealistic, even to officials in the nuclear industry. Dr. Akira Oyama, vice-chairman of Japan's Atomic Energy Commission, admitted in 1991 that: "It will be extremely difficult to keep up the pace" to build the 40 plants needed to meet the goal. When a reporter for the Financial Times' Energy Economist asked an anonymous Japanese utility executive if he expected utilities to fulfill the government's plan, the executive simply laughed.

In South Korea, too, public opposition to nuclear power is starting to have an impact. The country's first nuclear protest occurred in December 1988 when residents near the Kori facility marched to protest the illegal burial of radioactive wastes outside the plant's fence. Then, this January, local government officials revoked permission to build two additional reactors at the Yonggwang station - the first time that had ever happened in Korea. The growing movement has led the state-owned utility, KEPCO, to admit that it is having difficulty finding sites for additional stations.

In October 1991, after a turbine fire roared through the turbo-generator building of Chernobyl's reactor #2, the Ukrainian government announced that it would shut down the damaged unit permanently, and that it would close the remaining two reactors at Chernobyl (#1 and #3) by the end of 1993. However, reactors #1 and #3 have remained in use, as the country continues to face power shortages.

The G-7 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) have pledged $2.3 billion in assistance to help close the remaining two Chernobyl reactors. Under intense pressure from the G-7, Ukrane pleged to close all the Chernobyl reactors in April 1994 and then again in December 1995, but is still holding out for more Western support.

BAD CREDIT AT THE WORLD BANK

Despite the troubles facing the nuclear industry, many national governments - and the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) - still maintain an expensive and vocal support of the technology. In fact, for 40 years, governments have heavily promoted and subsidized nuclear power - a trend that continues to this day. Indeed, governments belonging to the OECD's International Energy Agency spent almost $4.8 billion dollars on nuclear research in 1994, nearly 55 percent of their total energy research and development budgets of $8.7 billion. In Japan, in 1993, the government squandered 95 percent of its energy research and development budget on nuclear energy.

Meanwhile, the IAEA continues to make the industry sales pitch to developing countries. In November 1991, the director general of the IAEA, Hans Blix, traveled to Bangkok to admonish Thai officials that "any developing countries with fairly high levels of development...must begin to prepare for a nuclear period."

Despite decades of IAEA and nuclear vendor promotion, the Third World accounted for only 23,000 megawatts of nuclear power in operation at the start of 1996, less than 7 percent of the world total. Many of these plants have run far over budget or behind schedule, and have been plagued by technical and waste disposal problems. That should not be surprising, given the difficulties nuclear power has faced in industrial countries. One result is that the World Bank, despite its established partiality to grandiose development projects, has taken an active role in slowing the spread of nuclear power to developing countries, most recently Thailand and Indonesia. As an investment, the Bank says, nuclear power is both too costly and too risky.

Chernobyl was the accident that couldn't happen according to industry pronouncements in the decades leading up to the catastrophe. In fact, less than three months before the reactor blew up, the Ukrainian Minister of Power told Soviet Life that the odds of a major accident were one in 10,000 years.

When the accident happened, the effects were not limited to those overwhelming damages to public health and the economy that now confront the former Soviet republics. In the words of the Energy Economist, the Chernobyl accident has "blown a hole in the Ukrainian psyche," and led to an intense feeling of "doom" in the country.

Such a sentiment may be justified, given the fact that twice in the past decade - in both 1986 and 1991 - Chernobyl has suffered a major accident. With this history, some nuclear experts worry about what lies ahead in 1996 and beyond if Chernobyl continues in operation.

IF NOT NUCLEAR, THEN WHAT?

In the West, as in Ukraine, there are two competing ideas of how to spend the G-7 funds and close the remaining two reactors at Chernobyl. One involves completing two partially built, Soviet-designed nuclear reactors, at a cost of at least $1 billion. Such a venture would require temporarily reviving an industry that is probably on its last legs.

The second idea is to replace the Chernobyl facility with a combination of energy efficiency improvements (which have proven to be a highly successful substitute for new production capacity in other countries), increased use of natural gas, and investments in renewable energy technologies such as windpower.

An investment of less than $900 million in end-use energy efficiency alone could offset Chernobyl's existing electric generating capacity two times over, according to a study for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Repairing the Ukraine's natural gas grid, which currently leaks some 40 percent of its supply, would greatly increase the country's supply without any further gas purchases.

Finally, the Ukraine's potential for renewable energy, including biomass, solar, and wind, far exceeds that of nuclear. Wind alone, using current technology, could produce 30 billion kilowatt-hours per year, or roughly three times the amount of electricity generated by Chernobyl, according to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.

Nicholas Lenssen is a Research Associate at E SOURCE, a syndicated information service focusing on end-use energy technologies and their application. Christopher Flavin is Vice-President for Research at the Worldwatch Institute and a specialist in international energy and climate policies. They are coauthors of Power Surge: Guide to the Coming Energy Revolution, published by W.W. Norton in 1994.