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The Chernobyl Bio-clean Programme Greenfield is committed to developing a tri-state project in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, to revitalise and rehabilitate the lands contaminated by the Chernobyl explosion in April 1986 so that they can be reclaimed fully for human use. As Greenfield’s chairwoman, Anne McClain, put it during her first visit to Belarus in 2007: “I have spent a significant part of my career involved in conservation and protection of the natural world, and for this reason I have the hope that we, Greenfield, will also be able to create a solid foundation for a plan to clean up, finally, the areas affected by the Chernobyl disaster. “We have already done fairly extensive preliminary work to establish if such a project is possible, and I am glad to say that the results are encouraging. We hope and intend that we will soon be able to carry out further research and conduct field trials. The purpose of this would, ultimately, be to implement a serious and comprehensive programme of bio-cleaning to decontaminate all the areas affected by Chernobyl. “I look forward to seeing this become a reality, and I believe it would be a truly marvellous achievement for Belarus to combine the status of a leading green energy producer with the victory of ridding its land and its people of the pernicious effects of the worst nuclear accident in history.” Specifically the plan is to grow crops for biomass to turn into sustainable green energy, using state-of-the-art, second generation bioethanol technology. Briefly, this will involve using lands that are not currently or directly used to produce food in order to produce the biomass required for ethanol production. Significant work has already been done to verify the theories behind the remediation aspect, which indicates that it is possible to ‘clean’ the soil of radioisotopes (mainly 137Cs and 90Sr) at a significantly more rapid pace than that of natural radioactive decay. Further trials are needed to determine both how efficiently this can be done and which plant species are most effective. Experts have variously estimated the natural remediation period between 300 and 600 years. Under the Bio-clean programme, this could perhaps be cut to one or two generations. Greenfield is convinced that only the introduction of a commercially viable element into the remediation project will get it going in any meaningful way. After 23 years, relatively little progress has been made in this regard because of the enormous cost, which cannot be borne by Belarus alone and which has not received adequate support in the form of international funding: our view is that a large-scale ethanol industry centred on the contaminated zones could change that and make remediation of the land financially viable. There are several interlinked aspects to Greenfield’s projects in Belarus and how they can benefit Chernobyl remediation. Second generation ethanol technology The potential of the project is tied to the emergence of commercial-scale second generation ethanol technology: this is what will enable ethanol production in the Chernobyl area to play a key part in speeding up decontamination of the soil, as existing biomass from these areas will be useable. Second generation ethanol, now only a few years away if you’re an optimist, will use cellulose biomass of all kinds, not just grains or sugar stock (cane or beet) as at present. And the Chernobyl lands constitute a vast resource of biomass, much of it undisturbed for over two decades. The plan is to begin intensive field trials in the Chernobyl zone as soon as possible. These will measure the relative efficiency of various crops in absorbing radioactive particles from the soil. They will also determine, among other parameters, which combinations of biomass crops give the best result in terms of a balance between ethanol yield per hectare and the quantity of radionuclides absorbed by the plants used. This will begin pretty much as soon as construction work starts on the Mozyr ethanol plant. Much work has already been done by both Belarus and external scientific institutes and the results they have accumulated are encouraging. Greenfield is very hopeful that our approach can provide a commercially-grounded and viable solution to remediation of radio-contamination which could cut the time needed to return these lands to full human use by up to 90%. In other words, if applied on a sufficiently large scale, this approach may be able to cut the recovery time from several centuries to several decades. We want to be quite clear on this: the initial investigations are very encouraging, otherwise we would not be going in this direction and we would not have appointed a Project Director, Ms Iryna Ananich, to head the team, but we still have to do a great deal of further work to establish if it can fully succeed and to create a ‘business plan’ which will attract the necessary funding for such a staggering project. For once it does start, the Chernobyl Bio-clean Project will continue for 30 to 60 years before completion. And of course, ethanol production will not be the sole aspect. No competition with food production If it is feasible, and we do believe that it will prove to be, the other plus point, from the perspective of both Belarus and the European Union, is that using these lands will not divert food production or contribute to driving up agricultural prices. As the EU does not have enough farmland to turn over to biofuels to meet its 2020 targets, imports will be essential, preferably from nearby rather than from distant producers such as Brazil. In addition, as existing growth will be used and replanted there will not be a carbon cost due to first having to clear the land. Finally, ethanol produced in Belarus will meet both EU quality standards and the strict 'sustainability' criteria mandated in December 2008. To us it’s a plan which can bring only benefits to all, a plan which can unite all motivations: the commercial motive of profit, the humanitarian and social motive of eradicating the contamination and saving many, many lives, and the climate-change motive of substituting green for fossil fuels and cutting GHG emissions — all the way down to local economic effects such as increasing crop yields, employment, and income levels in Belarus agriculture as well as aiding the country’s general economic development. However, the Mozyr plant will not initially be taking its feedstock from the Chernobyl zones. Some of the grains it will use will indeed come from there, certified safe, but grains are not particularly good at removing radio-isotopes such as caesium and strontium, the major problem in the area. Second generation ethanol technology will therefore be essential to moving to full implementation of the bio-clean programme. |
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