http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 638598.ece
The Sunday Times skrev:
July 4, 2009
Irish firm cleanses Chernobyl’s fields
New method of neutralising contaminated soil will take just three decades instead of centuries
Jan Battles
It will be centuries before Belarus is completely free from the radio-activity that fell after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 23 years ago. But an Irish company has come up with an innovative way of cleaning up the country’s contaminated land in as little as 30 years.
The Chernobyl Bio-clean Programme is being presented as a win-win solution for the former Soviet republic. Greenfield Project Management plans to use polluted soils to grow bio-fuel crops that will suck up the radioactivity. This will make the earth suitable to grow food within decades rather than centuries.
The resulting bio-fuel will be free from radioactivity, Greenfield says, and will create much-needed economic activity in the area. The company has already signed a framework deal with the Belarussian government and was in Minsk last week meeting officials and its local partner, Belbiopharm, a state biotech company.
Experts from the Belarus Academy of Sciences and the Helmholtz Association for scientific research in Germany agree that repeated harvesting of biomass crops as raw material for bio-fuel refineries would remove radio-nuclides from the soil in contaminated areas.
When the reactor at Chernobyl exploded in Ukraine in 1986, neighbouring Belarus was worst affected, receiving almost 80% of the fall-out, covering 23% of its territory, some 46,500 square kilometres. These soils are now heavily polluted with caesium-137, strontium-90, plutonium and americium, which will take hundreds of years to decay.
While the most heavily polluted land remains evacuated, millions of people live in the contaminated zone. Despite the risk of radioactivity migrating into the food chain, farmers grow some food crops — mostly grains. Most of the radioactive particles from the soil end up concentrated in the roots and stalks, which are ploughed back into the land after harvest — creating a vicious circle of repeated contamination.
Greenfield’s project involves harvesting the entire plant to be used in a refinery to make bio-ethanol, decontaminating the land gradually with each crop. Basil Miller of Greenfield said: “Our advice is if you do this continuously across the area you speed up the process of returning the land to normal use by up to 90%. So where it might have taken 300 or 400 years for this to come about, we might do it between one or two generations.”
First, in a joint venture with the state in Belarus, the company will build a plant facility in Mozyr, deep in the contaminated zone, that will initially use non-contaminated crops to produce 700m litres of bio-ethanol each year.
Andrei Savinykh, the Belarus diplomatic representative at the United Nations in Geneva, said: “We see this idea as a far-reaching possibility. We can produce a fuel on our own territory, thus enhancing our energy security and sustainability of economic development.
“It is a kind of a win-win situation, which is why we are attracted and fascinated by the whole idea. Because we are creating a fuel that is green by its nature, we are not polluting the environment.
“There are vast areas in Belarus which contain radioactive particles in the soil. Those lands are used for agricultural production now. There is a big dilemma here because if we stop producing agricultural products in these areas we will devastate the local economy, but we are afraid of possible migration of radioactive particles from the soil through food to humans. The project is an ultimate solution to the problem. We switch to the production of bio-fuel so our people’s health is protected and we give them an economic foundation to sustain their living.”
Greenfield insists the bio-fuel produced will have no radioactive material in it as only pure ethanol is distilled out, making it safe to use. The heavy radioactive residues left behind in the process will be burnt in a power station producing a concentrated radioactive ash. This can be disposed of at existing treatment works for nuclear waste, according to the company.
If the facilities in Belarus are not in compliance with the International Atomic Energy Agency standards, Greenfield will export it to compliant facilities in Russia across the border.
The project was the brainchild of Ann McClain, chairwoman of Greenfield and a niece of the late Freddy Heineken, the former president of the Dutch brewing company. McClain got seed funding from the Heineken Foundation, a charitable scheme, to explore the possibility of the bio-ethanol project