Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1996 09:47:41 -0400
 

      23 April 1996 (Reuter) - France will decommission its
land-based strategic nuclear missiles in September, a military
official has said. The move will leave France's nuclear strike
force relying on Rafale fighter-bombers and submarine-launched
missiles.

      23 April 1996 (Reuter) - Villagers returning to a
contaminated area, abandoned after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear
disaster, watched in horror as fire destroyed their old home
area, engulfing buildings, fields and woods. Fires apparently
started in dry waist-high grass sent radiation readings
soaring in the 30-km (18-mile) exclusion zone around Chernobyl
and roared through five villages.

      23 April 1996 (Reuter) - Japan has offered Ukraine $25
million to help ensure safety standards at the former Soviet
republic's 15 nuclear reactors, a top Ukrainian diplomat said. 
Deputy Foreign Minister Kostyantyn Hryshchenko said Japanese
Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto had made the pledge to
President Leonid Kuchma during last week's summit of world
leaders in Moscow on nuclear issues.

      23 April 1996 (Reuter) - The Greenpeace environmental
group called on Bulgaria to close its Kozloduy nuclear plant,
saying its ageing reactors were an accident waiting to happen. 
Bulgaria has said it wants to phase out use of the plant but
cannot because it needs the power. It has received EU and
other European funds to improve safety conditions.

      23 April 1996 (Reuter) - Fire engulfed five derelict
villages in Ukraine's exclusion zone around the Chernobyl
nuclear power station as evacuated residents visited their
abandoned homes. Some of the 300 villagers who had come to see
their deserted wooden houses and tend gravesites in Tovsty Lis
broke down hysterically as flames raced through the settlement
and adjacent fields and woods.

      23 April 1996 (Reuter) - China, in its first response to
last week's Moscow summit call for a global ban on atomic
tests, said it was not yet time to close the door on the use
of "peaceful" nuclear explosions. Beijing has resisted intense
pressure to join an international testing moratorium, saying
China's 43 tests to date were a fraction of those carried out
by the four other nuclear powers - the United States, France,
Britain and Russia.

      23 April 1996 (Reuter) - China, the only nuclear power
that has not yet halted its test programme, believes nuclear
explosions are a peaceful use of such energy, a Foreign
Ministry spokesman said. The door to nuclear explosions should
not be closed because many experts still differed on the
safety of the technology, spokesman Shen Guofang told a news
briefing.

      22 April 1996 (Reuter) - A top official pledged on
Monday that Ukraine would permanently close this year one of
two reactors still operating at the Chernobyl nuclear power
station. Environment Minister Yuri Kostenko said President
Leonid Kuchma made the announcement about Chernobyl's No. 1
reactor at a weekend summit in Moscow of leaders of the Group
of Seven wealthy countries.

      22 April 1996 (Reuter) - Several dozen anti-nuclear
activists symbolically buried a scale model of the Chernobyl
nuclear power station's ruined fourth reactor and demanded the
plant's immediate closure. The protesters, clad in white and
representing the environmental group Greenpeace, placed a
model of the "sarcophagus" erected around the reactor in a
mock coffin outside President Leonid Kuchma's office.

      22 April 1996 (Reuter) - Indonesian Mines and Energy
Ministry officials support the idea of building the country's
first nuclear power plant on crowded Java island despite
popular opposition to the plan, newspaper reports said. The
Jakarta Post newspaper quoted Yogo Pratomo, director general
of the Ministry of Mines and Energy, as saying that demand for
energy was growing at more than nine percent annually and
nuclear power projects were therefore inevitable.

      22 April 1996 (UPI) - Greece denounced a plan by Turkey
to build a nuclear power plant, saying the project was
unjustified. "The project is being planned for other reasons,"
said Greek deputy  Environment Minister Elizabeth Papazoi, who
refused to give the other reasons. "Its output will cover only
two per cent of Turkey's energy need," Papazoi said.

      23 April 1996 (UPI) - A fire that raged near the
Chernobyl nuclear power plant spread radioactive particles in
the air but posed little threat to area residents or to the
still-active station, Ukrainian officials and independent
experts said. Officials in the Ukrainian capital said
firefighters quenched the blaze after it burned grass and
woodlands about 6 miles north of the Chernobyl plant.