No room for nuclear storage facilities in Chernobyl

Ukrainian parliament Speaker Vladimir Litvin has declared that no nuclear storage facilities would be built at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Litvin expressed regret, saying that Viktor Yushchenko's statement to this effect “had been misinterpreted,” the press service of the Ukrainian parliament said on Tuesday.

"All I can say is that nothing of that kind will be built in Chernobyl,” the speaker underlined.

" We should drop this subject and set the minds of those who suffered from the planetary catastrophe at rest," Litvin said. He said that all those who still cherished plans of turning Ukraine into a huge dumping site should "experiment in their own orchards first."

President Viktor Yushchenko earlier declared that he was prepared to look into this problem and make a political decision on the problem of the storage of spent nuclear fuel brought from other countries to the alienation zone only if experts and scientists approved these plans and after public debates only.

Such advantageous proposals might be considered after thorough studies of the nuclear storage projects, Yushchenko noted.

His statement triggered a negative response from Ukrainian politicians, Itar-Tass reports. V.Y.