In an appeal to the IAEA for help earlier this week, Ukrainian officials said that Chernobyl staff have been held by the Russian military without rotation and are exhausted. Ukraine is also home to the former Chernobyl nuclear plant, where radioactivity is still leaking, which was taken by Russian forces in the opening of the invasion after a fierce battle with the Ukrainian national guards protecting the decommissioned facility. “It is a question of the security of the whole world!” he said in a statement. Shmyhal called on western nations to close the skies over the country’s nuclear plants.
President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and others called for an immediate end to the fighting there.įollowing a conversation with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, IAEA Director Grossi appealed to all parties to “refrain from actions” that could put Ukraine’s nuclear power plants in danger. In the wake of the attack on Zaporizhzhia, U.S. Ukraine is heavily reliant on nuclear energy, with 15 reactors at four stations that provide about half the country’s electricity. “It was this type of damage that led to the Fukushima accident.” What concerns remain? “The real concern is not a catastrophic explosion as happened at Chernobyl but damage to the cooling system which is required even when the reactor is shut down,” he said in a statement. “That is my big _ biggest concern,” he said.ĭavid Fletcher, a University of Sydney professor in its School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, who previously worked at UK Atomic Energy, noted that even shutting down the reactors would not help if the cooling system failed in such a way. The loss of off-site power could force the plant to rely on emergency diesel generators, which are highly unreliable and could fail or run out of fuel, causing a station blackout that would stop the water circulation needed to cool the spent fuel pool, he said. Perhaps the biggest issue, however, is the plant’s power supply, said Najmedin Meshkati, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California who has studied both the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters, raising a concern also voiced by Wolfsthal and others. Must read | Russia and Ukraine: The nuclear questions “However, as you can imagine, the operator and the regulator have been telling us that the situation naturally continues to be extremely tense and challenging.” Earlier this week, Grossi already had warned that the IAEA was “gravely concerned” with Russian forces conducting military operations so close nearby. “All of the safety systems of the six reactors at the plant were not affected at all and there has been no release of radioactive material,” he said. Initially, firefighters were not able to get near the flames because they were being shot at, Tuz said.Īfter speaking with Ukrainian authorities on Friday, Rafael Grossi, the director general of the IAEA, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, said a building next to the reactors was hit and not a reactor itself. Plant spokesman Andriy Tuz told Ukrainian television that early Friday morning, shells fell directly on the facility and set fire to one of its six reactors. Smoke billows from a building at the entrance to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Enerhodar (State Emergency Services of Ukraine/Handout via Reuters) The evacuation of Europe,” he said in an emotional speech in the middle of the night, calling on nations to pressure Russia’s leadership to end the fighting near the plant. “If there is an explosion, that’s the end for everyone. The consequence of that, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, would be widespread and dire. A failure of those systems could lead to a disaster similar to that of Japan’s Fukushima plant, when a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011 destroyed cooling systems, triggering meltdowns in three reactors. One major concern, raised by Ukraine’s state nuclear regulator, is that if fighting interrupts power supply to the nuclear plant, it would be forced to use less-reliable diesel generators to provide emergency power to operating cooling systems. But even though the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant is of a different design than Chernobyl and is protected from fire, nuclear safety experts and the International Atomic Energy Agency warn that waging war in and around such facilities presents extreme risks.
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