Ukraine: Disaster fears as Russian shelling damages nuclear plant power lines again
- ‘The countdown has begun’, backup generators have enough fuel to maintain Zaporizhzhia plant for just 15 days, state nuclear power company announces
- Nuclear safety and security situation at the facility is ‘extremely precarious’ and there is an urgent need to establish a protection zone’, the IAEA says
Ukraine’s nuclear operator said on Thursday that Russian shelling damaged power lines connecting Europe’s largest nuclear power plant to the Ukrainian grid, leaving the plant again relying on emergency diesel generators.
As fighting in Ukraine has damaged power lines and electrical substations, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has repeatedly operated on backup generators to cool the reactors and keep other safety systems running until regular power could be restored.
The generators have enough fuel to maintain the plant in southeastern Ukraine for just 15 days, state nuclear power company Energoatom said on its Telegram channel.
“The countdown has begun”, Energoatom said, noting it had limited possibilities to “maintain the ZNPP in a safe mode”, raising fears of a potential nuclear disaster.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said on Thursday that the plant’s latest switch to backup power further underlines “the extremely precarious nuclear safety and security situation at the facility and the urgent need to establish a protection zone around it”.
The development “again shows the plant’s fragile and vulnerable situation,” Rafael Grossi, the director general of the UN nuclear watchdog, said.
Relying on diesel generators “is clearly not a sustainable way to operate a major nuclear facility”, Grossi added. “Measures are needed to prevent a nuclear accident at the site. The establishment of a nuclear safety and security protection zone is urgently needed”.
The plant’s six reactors are not in operation during the war, but outside electricity is needed to cool its spent fuel. Russia and Ukraine have traded blame for months amid the war for shelling at and around the plant that the International Atomic Energy Agency has warned could cause a radiation emergency.
Russian forces occupied the plant during the early days of the war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. The plant is located in the Zaporizhzhia region, one of four Ukrainian provinces that Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed last month.
Although Putin signed a decree transferring the nuclear plant to Russian ownership, Ukrainian workers continue to run the plant, and Ukrainian forces remain in control of parts of the Zaporizhzhia region.
Energoatom has repeatedly called for the withdrawal of Russian forces from the plant and the creation of a demilitarised zone around it. Grossi has spent months trying to negotiate such a security zone.
The latest loss of reliable electricity overnight came when Russia shelled two power lines that were connecting the plant to the Ukrainian grid in “an attempt to reconnect the nuclear plant to the Russian power system,” Energoatom alleged.
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The company claimed the Russian side would try to repair the power lines to connect the plant to the Russian grid and therefore supply power to occupied Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region that Russia also currently controls.
Across the Dnipro River from the power plant, the city of Nikopol was also shelled, damaging residential buildings, a gas station and several private enterprises, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office said on Thursday.
Other Ukrainian cities were also hit, with Russia using drones, missiles and heavy artillery that left six civilians dead and 16 others wounded, according to the president’s office. Energy and water infrastructure facilities were hit in Zelensky’s native city of Kryvyi Rih, leaving several districts without electricity or water in the city that had a pre-war population of 635,000 people, local Governor Oleksandr Vilkul said.
Further east in the Donetsk region, battles continued for the towns of Bakhmut and Avdiivka, where authorities said the population was under constant shelling and living without electricity or heat.
