The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, has been occupied by Russian forces since the first days of the war, and ongoing fighting near the facility has heightened fears of a disaster that could affect nearby towns in southern Ukraine – or potentially another surrounding area. On Thursday, the plant was cut off from the power grid for the first time after fires damaged the only working transmission line, according to Ukraine’s nuclear power agency. It was unclear if the plant had been reconnected. While it remains off-grid, it will have to rely on emergency diesel generators to run cooling systems necessary for the safe operation of the reactors. The shutdown underscored concerns about the plant, which the government in Kyiv claims Russia is effectively holding hostage, storing weapons there and launching attacks from around it. Moscow, meanwhile, accuses Ukraine of firing recklessly at the facilities, which are located in the city of Enerhodar. “Anyone who understands nuclear safety issues has been shaking for the last six months,” Mycle Schneider, an independent policy consultant and coordinator of the Global Nuclear Industry Status Report, said before the latest incident at the plant. Ukraine cannot simply shut down its nuclear plants during the war because it is heavily dependent on them, and its 15 reactors at four plants provide about half of its electricity. However, an ongoing conflict near an active nuclear plant is worrying for many experts who fear that a damaged facility could lead to disaster. That fear is evident just across the Dnieper River in Nikopoli, where residents have endured near-constant Russian bombardment since July 12, with eight people killed, 850 buildings damaged and more than half the population of 100,000 displaced. the city. Liudmyla Shyshkina, a 74-year-old widow who lived in front of the Zaporizhzhia plant before her apartment was bombed and her husband killed, said she believes the Russians are capable of deliberately causing a nuclear disaster. The fighting in early March caused a brief fire at the plant’s training complex, which officials said did not result in a release of radioactivity. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia’s military actions there amounted to “nuclear blackmail”. No civilian nuclear power plant is designed for war situations, although the buildings housing Zaporizhzhia’s six reactors are protected by reinforced concrete that could withstand an errant shell, experts say. The most immediate concern is that a power outage – as one nuclear power company, Energoatom, reported on Thursday – meant two remaining reactors at the plant were disconnected from the grid. The operator said he could not immediately comment on the operation of safety systems at the plant, where emergency diesel generators are sometimes unreliable. External power is needed not only to cool the two reactors that are still operating, but also the spent radioactive fuel stored in special facilities at the site — and just one of the plant’s four power lines that connect it to the network has worked. “If we lose the last one, we’re at the absolute mercy of emergency power generators,” said Najmedin Meshkati, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California. Another concern about close combat is that the pools where spent fuel rods are kept to cool are also vulnerable to shelling, which could cause radioactive material to be released. Kyiv told the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, that shelling earlier this week damaged transformers at a nearby conventional power plant, knocking out power to the Zaporizhzhia plant for several hours. The head of the nuclear agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said on Thursday that he hoped to send a mission to the plant within “days”. Negotiations on how the mission will gain access to the plant are complex but progressing, he told France-24 television after meeting in Paris with French President Emmanuel Macron, who pressed Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call last week to allow the UN agency to visit the website. “Kyiv accepts it. Moscow accepts it. So we have to go there,” Grossi said. At a UN Security Council meeting on Tuesday, UN political chief Rosemary DiCarlo urged the withdrawal of all military personnel and equipment from the plant and an agreement on a demilitarized zone around it. He and Snyder expressed concern that the seizure of the plant by Russian forces also impedes safety inspections and the replacement of critical components and puts severe pressure on hundreds of Ukrainian employees who operate the facility. “The potential for human error will be multiplied by fatigue,” said Meshkati, who was part of a panel appointed by the US National Academy of Sciences to identify lessons from the 2011 nuclear disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant. “Fatigue and stress are unfortunately two big safety factors.” If an incident at the Zaporizhzhia plant were to release significant amounts of radioactivity, the scale and location of the contamination would be largely determined by weather conditions, said Paul Dorfman, a nuclear safety expert at the University of Sussex who has advised the British and Irish people. governments. The massive earthquake and tsunami that hit the Fukushima plant destroyed cooling systems that caused three of its reactors to collapse. Much of the contaminated material was blown out to sea, limiting the damage. The April 26, 1986, explosion and fire at one of the four reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant north of Kiev sent a cloud of radioactive material over a wide area of Europe and beyond. In addition to fueling anti-nuclear sentiment in many countries, the disaster left deep psychological scars on Ukrainians. Zaporizhzhia’s reactors are of a different model than those at Chernobyl, but adverse winds could spread radioactive contamination in any direction, Dorfman said. “If something went wrong, then we have a full-scale radiological disaster that could reach Europe, reach all the way to the Middle East and certainly could reach Russia, but the most significant contamination would be in the immediate area,” he said. . That’s why Nikopol’s emergency services department has been taking radiation measurements every hour since the Russian invasion began. Before that, it was every four hours.
Jordans reported from Berlin. Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed.
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