![]() “Many of us did not expect a respected country’s military would take such an outrageous step,” he said. Mitsuru Fukuda, a professor at Nihon University in Tokyo and expert on crisis management and security, said the Zaporizhzhia attack raises broader questions for all countries. “But in a war, all of these different failures that would have to happen for a reactor to become damaged and meltdown - the likelihood of all of those happening becomes much more likely than it does in peacetime.” “Under normal circumstances, the likelihood of a reactor losing power and of the emergency diesel generators being damaged and of not being repaired adequately quickly is very, very small,” Acton said. James Acton, the co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the simple key to keeping the facilities safe was to immediately end any military operations around them. “The two incidents highlight the risk that facilities with radioactive material may suffer damage during the armed conflict, with potentially severe consequences,” he said. Grossi earlier this week appealed to Russia to let the Chernobyl staff “do their job safely and effectively.”ĭuring fighting on the weekend, Russian fire also hit a radioactive waste disposal facility in Kyiv and a similar facility in Kharkiv.īoth contained low-level waste such as those produced through medical use, and no radioactive release has been reported, but Grossi said the incidents should serve as a warning. 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. Another danger at nuclear facilities are the pools where spent fuel rods are kept to be cooled, which are more vulnerable to shelling and which could cause the release of radioactive material. ![]()
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