Chernobyl To Start Generating Power Again; Yes, That Chernobyl

Whenever historians want to give an example of the consequences produced by the hubris of humans in its careless attempt at harnessing nuclear energy, Chernobyl is a site that often comes up. It’s a cautionary tale that involves a nuclear meltdown and the city-wide evacuations that resulted from it. Now, Ukraine is intending on going back and turning the tragic site into one that would generate renewable energy via solar power.

The work to convert Chernobyl’s reputation from the most notable example of nuclear disaster into a generator of clean energy has actually started, with 4,000 solar panels already installed at the site, Seeker recently reported. The panels will cover an area comparable to two American football fields, which are intended to become the first solar power plant in Ukraine.

Meant to produce one megawatt of clean power, it’s a few dozen meters away from the so-called “sarcophagus,” which is the gigantic metal dome that is keeping the radiation that is still being produced by the 1986 nuclear disaster. According to the head of the Ukrainian-German company Solar Chernobyl, Yevgen Varyagin, the power plant will produce enough energy to power a “medium-sized village.”

The hope is that the solar plant will eventually be capable of producing 100 times the energy that it is capable of now, Futurism notes. Doing so, however, would require significantly more investments than the $1.54 million that has already been spent.

One of the biggest advantages of this project is how it can revitalize what had previously been considered lost land. Although the area around the disaster zone is still not suitable for things like agriculture, there are many other uses for it.

Right now, the proposition that is gaining the most attention is the installation of solar plants. The country has actually already received proposals from several companies that are interested in making this happen.