This £3 million programme ran from 2003 to 2007, contributing to national and international efforts to mitigate the social and economic consequences of the early shut-down of early-generation Soviet reactors. The programme provided support to enable nuclear power plant management, trade unions, local governments and citizens groups to plan socially responsible decommissioning programmes.
The Chernobyl accident of 1986 raised international public concern over the safety of early-generation Soviet-designed reactors. G7 governments and the EU agreed to cooperate with nuclear power plant operators and regulators to seek to prevent a repeat of the accident by providing assistance to improve safety and help decommission those reactors that did not meet international safety standards or were nearing the end of their design life.
A further concern was the social, environmental and economic impact of the shut-down of nuclear facilities in mono-industry towns, and the need to address staff dissatisfaction to prevent a further degradation in operational safety and site security.
Following a series of UK-funded scoping studies in 2002 and 2003, a UK programme was developed with the objective of ensuring that high levels of operational safety were maintained before, during and after closure. It also aimed to prevent the risk of proliferation of nuclear material and expertise by developing plant management, community and business capacity building programmes. It achieved this by:
- Creating sustainable employment opportunities for redundant nuclear power plant employees;
- Creating businesses with UK partners;
- Developing enterprises and entrepreneurship;
- Enhancing capacities among the labour force for adaptability and the skills needed for the labour market, and
- Developing business infrastructure for local economic development.
For over five years, short-term technical support together with seed-corn business funding was directed at towns in the vicinity of:
- Chernobyl in Ukraine;
- Ignalina in Lithuania;
- Kozloduy in Bulgaria.
In total, 34 business and social capacity building projects received financial and technical support. All projects achieved practical results and some significantly changed the lives of the local population. The impact of UK investment was felt primarily through job creation and capacity building:
- Over the period 2003-2006, UK stimulated the creation of around 700 jobs for local people in the three small towns. The programme’s impact was greatest in the Ignalina region of Lithuania, where the UK stimulated one in five of the new jobs needed to offset job losses;
- Municipalities and key town institutions are now much better equipped to address emerging challenges and changes.
In 2009, DECC commissioned an independent impact evaluation of the programme from International Organisation Development. This examined the Programme’s contribution to the social and economic resilience of communities affected by nuclear power plant closure.
The main finding of the evaluation was that the programme made a significant contribution to sustainable economic development in all three mono-industry localities and that this contribution drew as much from the approach taken as from the interventions and activities supported:
- In all three locations there was a clear sense that communities are better prepared and equipped to cope with the closure of reactors at the nuclear power plants;
- Some of this “preparedness” relates to fundamental shifts in both the understanding and acceptance of entrepreneurship and business as a positive and possible choice, and also an increase in trust in the role and conduct of local authorities and bureaucrats in being fair and able to make decisions and judgements based on merit;
- The programme had an important impact in the creation of a significant number of new jobs and helped to avoid widespread “intellectual migration”.
You can find more information about the programme in the Reports and Publications section:
and in the Global Threat Reduction Programme annual progress reports.