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NIKOPOL, Aug. 25 (AP) — Ukraine’s fighting Zaporozhye nuclear power plant was temporarily disconnected from the power grid due to fire damage, causing blackouts in the region and heightening fears of a disaster in the country. worry. Because of the Chernobyl disaster.
The plant is the largest in Europe and has been occupied by Russian troops since the beginning of the war.
The Kyiv government claims Russia is essentially holding the plant hostage, storing weapons there and launching attacks from around it, while Moscow accuses Ukraine of recklessly firing on the facility.
The plant lost power for the first time on Thursday after a fire damaged transmission lines, according to Ukraine’s nuclear power operator.
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According to Russia’s appointed governor, Yevgeny Balitsky, the damaged lines apparently carried the outgoing power, so the area lost power.
He said two reactors that were still in use were taken offline due to damage, but one was quickly restored and power was restored to the area.
Obviously the affected circuit is different from the circuit that powers the cooling system whose operation is critical to the safe operation of the reactor.
Loss of power in these supply lines is a major concern for experts watching the battle carefully.
Still, Thursday’s shutdown underscored concerns about the battle over the factory.
“Anyone who understands the issue of nuclear safety has been shaking for the past six months,” Mike Schneider, an independent policy adviser and coordinator of the State of the World Nuclear Industry Report, said ahead of the latest incident at nuclear power plants.
Ukraine cannot simply shut down its nuclear power plants during the war because it relies heavily on nuclear power plants, whose 15 reactors across four plants provide about half of the electricity.
Still, the ongoing conflict near a working atomic factory has unsettled many experts, who fear damage to the facility could lead to disaster.
This fear is evident across the Dnieper in Nikopol, where residents have come under almost constant Russian shelling since July 12, killing eight people, damaging 850 buildings and escaping more than half of the 100,000-strong population. City.
Widow Liudmyla Shyshkina, 74, who lived near the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant when her apartment was bombed and her husband killed, said she believed the Russians had the ability to deliberately cause nuclear disaster.
The fighting in early March sparked a brief fire at the factory’s training center, which officials said did not result in any radiation release.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia’s military operations in Ukraine amounted to “nuclear blackmail”.
Experts say no civilian nuclear power plant is designed for wartime situations, although the building housing the six reactors in Zaporozhye is protected by reinforced concrete to withstand the wrong shell.
A more immediate concern is that plant power outages could disrupt cooling systems critical to the safe operation of the reactors, and emergency diesel generators are sometimes unreliable.
The pools that keep the spent fuel rods cool are also vulnerable to shelling, which could lead to the release of radioactive material.
Kyiv told the United Nations nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency that shelling earlier this week damaged transformers at a nearby conventional power plant, disrupting power at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant for hours.
The head of the IAEA, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said on Thursday that he hoped to send a mission to the nuclear power plant within “a few days.”
He said on France-24 television after a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris that negotiations on how the delegation could access the factory were complicated but were moving forward, Macron urged in a phone call last week. Russian President Vladimir Putin has allowed UN agencies to access the website.
“Kyiv accepts it. Moscow accepts it. So we need to go there,” Grossi said.
At a U.N. Security Council meeting on Tuesday, U.N. political chief Rosemary DiCarlo urged the removal of all military personnel and equipment from the plant and an agreement on the demilitarized zone around it.
The United Nations Atomic Energy Agency said only one of the four lines supplying power to the nuclear power plant from the outside is currently operating. The external power source is critical not only for cooling the two reactors that are still operating, but also for the spent radioactive fuel stored in special facilities on site.
“If we lose the last one, we’ll be completely at the mercy of emergency generators,” said Najmedin Meshkati, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at USC.
He and Schneider expressed concern that the occupation of the plant by Russian troops has also hindered safety inspections and the replacement of critical components, and has put severe strain on the hundreds of Ukrainian workers who operate the facility.
“The potential for human error is multiplied by fatigue,” said Meshkati, who sits on a committee appointed by the National Academy of Sciences to learn lessons from the 2011 nuclear disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant.
“Unfortunately, fatigue and stress are the two biggest safety factors.”
Paul Dorfman, a nuclear safety expert at the University of Sussex who has advised British and Irish peoples, said that if the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant accident released a lot of radiation, the scale and location of the contamination would depend largely on the weather. government.
The massive earthquake and tsunami that hit the Fukushima nuclear power plant destroyed cooling systems and caused meltdowns in three of its reactors. Much of the contaminated material was blown out to sea, limiting losses.
On April 26, 1986, an explosion and fire broke out at one of the four reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant north of Kyiv, sending a cloud of radioactive material across Europe and beyond.
In addition to fueling anti-nuclear sentiment in many countries, the disaster has left deep psychological scars on Ukrainians.
Dorfman said Zaporozhye’s reactor was different from the Chernobyl model, but unfavorable winds could still spread radioactive contamination in any direction.
“If it does go wrong, then we have a full-blown radiological catastrophe that could spread to Europe, maybe even the Middle East, and of course Russia, but the worst contamination will be in,” he said. nearby area.” .
That’s why, since the beginning of the Russian invasion, Nikopol’s emergency services have been taking radiation measurements every hour. Before that, every four hours. (Associated Press)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from the Syndicated News feed, the body of the content may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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