Chernobyl Solar Project

According to various news outlets, a new solar farm is slated to commence operations later this month at Chernobyl.

Chernobyl wa the site of one of the world’s largest nuclear power plant installations and ground zero for one of the world’s worst disasters when the facility exploded in 1986, releasing untold amounts of deadly radiation into the air. The meltdown at the reactors turned nearly 1,000 square miles of the surrounding region into an uninhabitable wasteland, with the radiation in the soil expected to last for thousands and thousands of years to come. As a result, the land is not usable for farming or other agricultural purposes.

But in 2016, a clean energy partnership comprised of Ukrainian and German firms proposed restoring the Chernobyl site to its roots as a campus for electric generation, but this time utilizing solar equipment rather than nuclear technology. As initially constructed, the project will have 3,800 solar photovoltaic panels, which will produce one megawatt (MW) of power, enough to supply electricity to around 2,000 households. The project developer noted that the Chernobyl site is uniquely situated for energy applications inasmuch as the interconnecting transmission infrastructure and power lines remain, even though the reactors themselves were decommissioned years ago. The sponsor signaled its conviction that it was fitting that it will be adapting the site of an environmental disaster to one showcasing environmentally friendly clean energy. The project eventually will grow to have hundreds of thousands of solar panels that will be able to produce a total of 100 MW of electricity.

Image credit: creativecommons.org