Ukraine will spend $35 million to rebuild at 47-km east-west rail line that cuts across the northern tip of Kyiv region, through the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

Ukraine will spend $35 million to rebuild at 47-km east-west rail line that cuts across the northern tip of Kyiv region, through the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Once a busy line taking trains from Moscow to Khmelnytskiy, via Chernihiv, the line was abandoned after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear fire. By 2021, the restored line is to carry casks of spent fuel from three of Ukraine’s four nuclear power plants to a new Spent Fuel Storage Facility at Chernobyl. Funded with a $250 million loan from the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the project will generate about $225 million of procurement of American-made goods and services, largely from Holtec International of Camden, New Jersey. With Chernobyl tourism increasingly popular, tourism promoters propose that Ukrzaliznytsya send sealed railroad cars through the zone, now a wilderness area dotted with ghost villages and train stations.