Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant disconnected from Ukraine grid as Putin orders military expansion
25 August 2022, 18:55 | Updated: 25 August 2022, 19:08
The final pair of working reactors at the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant have been disconnected from Ukraine's grid, Kyiv has said.
Officials said fire damage to an overhead power line caused the reactors to be cut off from the grid.
Fires damaged the last remaining line to the plant while three others were damaged in Russian shelling following Moscow's invasion on 24 February.
Work is ongoing to reconnect the reactors at the site, which serves 20 per cent of Ukrainian needs and is the largest nuclear plant in Europe.
It comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an expansion of his country's armed forced by 137,000 by January 2023, taking the total number of combat personnel to 1.15million.
It was not immediately clear where the extra soldiers would come from, although it is possible young men and women could be conscripted.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has been occupied by Russian forces since the early days of the war, and continued fighting near the facility has heightened fears of a catastrophe that could affect nearby towns in southern Ukraine - or potentially an even wider region.
The government in Kyiv alleges Russia is essentially holding the Soviet-era nuclear plant hostage, storing weapons there and launching attacks from around it, while Moscow accuses Ukraine of recklessly firing on the facility, which is located in the city of Enerhodar.
"Anybody who understands nuclear safety issues has been trembling for the last six months," said Mycle Schneider, an independent policy consultant and coordinator of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report.
Ukraine cannot simply shut down its nuclear plants during the war because it is heavily reliant on them, and its 15 reactors at four stations provide about half of its electricity.
But an ongoing conflict near a working atomic plant is troubling for many experts who fear that a damaged facility could lead to a disaster.
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Fighting in early March caused a brief fire at the plant's training complex, which officials said did not result in the release of any radiation.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says Russia's military actions there amount to "nuclear blackmail".
No civilian nuclear plant is designed for a wartime situation, although the buildings housing Zaporizhzhia's six reactors are protected by reinforced concrete that could withstand an errant shell, experts say.
The more immediate concern is that a disruption of electricity supply to the plant could knock out cooling systems that are essential for the safe operation of the reactors, and emergency diesel generators are sometimes unreliable.
The pools where spent fuel rods are kept to be cooled also are vulnerable to shelling, which could cause the release of radioactive material.
Kyiv told the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, that shelling earlier this week damaged transformers at a nearby conventional power plant, disrupting electricity supplies to the Zaporizhzhia plant for several hours.
"These incidents show why the IAEA must be able to send a mission to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant very soon," said the agency's head, Rafael Mariano Grossi, adding that he expected that to happen "within the next few days, if ongoing negotiations succeed".
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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 demilitarised zone around it.
If an incident at the Zaporizhzhia plant were to release significant amounts of radiation, the scale and location of the contamination would be determined largely by the weather, said Paul Dorfman, a nuclear safety expert at the University of Sussex who has advised the British and Irish governments.
The massive earthquake and tsunami that hit the Fukushima plant destroyed cooling systems which triggered meltdowns in three of its reactors. Much of the contaminated material was blown out to sea, limiting the damage.
The April 26, 1986, explosion and fire at one of four reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear plant north of Kyiv sent a cloud of radioactive material across a wide swath of Europe and beyond.
In addition to fuelling anti-nuclear sentiment in many countries, the disaster left deep psychological scars on Ukrainians.
