Pripyat River
- Recently World Wide Fund (WWF) for Nature has warned that dredging of Pripyat River could wreak havoc on an estimated 28 million people in Ukraine.
- Pripyat River flows near the site of the infamous nuclear accident at Chernobyl.
- It is Ukraine’s most important river, on which its capital city of Kiev is located.
- The city of Pripyat, with a population of 45,000, was completely evacuated after the Chernobyl disaster and is now a ghost town.
- The Pripyat River is being dredged as part of the restoration of a bilateral waterway between Ukraine and Belarus and is being seen as the first step of the much larger E40 project.
- The E40 project envisions connecting the Black and Baltic Seas for ocean-going ships to ply.
- It seeks to connect the ports of Gdansk in Poland on the Baltic, with that of Kherson in Ukraine on the Black Sea.
- The Pripyat will become a permanent source of radioactive contaminants because annual dredging will be needed to ensure the successful operation of the E40 waterway.
- The dredging of Chernobyl exclusion zone on Pripyat River could increase the radiation risk.
