The capture of the Ukrainian nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia by Russian forces in March immediately raised fears that the world could face another nuclear disaster on the scale of the Chernobyl explosion nearly 40 years ago. The The United States Embassy in Kyiv was quick to call the bombing of Europe’s largest nuclear power station a “war crime”.
“We survived a night that could have stopped history, the history of Ukraine, the history of Europe,” Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy said. One explosion in Zaporizhzhia would have equaled “six Chernobyls”, he said, referring to the 1986 Ukrainian nuclear reactor meltdown — widely regarded as the most catastrophic nuclear disaster in history, with unprecedented health, economic and environmental impacts.
What makes Zaporizhzhia fear a catastrophe?
Earlier this week, with continued shelling around the factory on several occasions cut off access to the electricity gridplans have been announced for shut down the last working reactor in Zaporizhzhia. A stable supply of electricity is essential for any nuclear power plant in order to maintain the radioactive fuel cooling systems. Zaporizhzhia has diesel generators to be turned on when the main power supply is cut, but this is not a long-term solution.
“If the electricity goes out, then we’re dependent on fairly old diesel generators to run the security systems,” Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons expert, told CBS News. “Once you lose main power, you’re almost in a twin-engine plane that loses one engine, and then you’re in a bad position.”
“For a nuclear plant in the US or the UK to have to switch to backup power, it can happen once or twice in a decade,” de Bretton-Gordon said. “So when it happens once or twice a week… the chance of additional problems increases exponentially.”
After the shutdown, Zaporizhzhia will enter a “cold state”, according to Ukrainian nuclear operator Energoatom.
But the integrity of the factory has been compromised by weeks of bombardment, according to a 52 page report compiled by the United Nations-backed global nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which sent a team of inspectors to Zaporizhzhia at the beginning of September.
“Any further escalation affecting the six-reactor plant could lead to a serious nuclear accident with potentially serious radiological consequences for human health and the environment in Ukraine and elsewhere,” the IAEA warned.
The agency’s director-general, Rafael Grossi, noted in the report that Ukrainian technicians who have continued to operate the plant under Russian occupation are “under constant stress and pressure, especially with the limited staff available. “. He expressed concern that the conditions could “lead to an increase in human error with implications for nuclear safety”.
The IAEA has called for all military vehicles and equipment currently on the sprawling nuclear complex to be removed and the facility turned into a demilitarized zone. Grossi, along with the U.S. and Ukrainian governments, said the Russian military should return “full control of the facility to Ukraine.”
“Russia is playing Russian roulette with a nuclear incident,” Barbara Woodward, Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations, told the UN Security Council.
Speaking on “Face The Nation” on CBS, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova, stressed that the shutdown of the reactor was a forced decision for her country, “not a complete resolution”.
“The complete resolution is for the Russians to come out, implement the IAEA recommendations and demilitarize the plant… This will bring their security,” she said.
How does Zaporizhzhia compare to Chernobyl?
The Chernobyl disaster still occupies an important place in the collective memory of Ukrainians and the world. The explosion of its No. 4 reactor displaced 200,000 people in what was then the Soviet Union, left 93,000 square miles of land uninhabitable, and had myriad consequences for residents of the region and across the generations.
According to the Chernobyl Childhood Illness Program, funded by the US Congress, an examination of 116,655 Ukrainian adolescents – who were up to 6 years old or in utero when exposed to nuclear fallout, or who were born up to 45 months after the Chernobyl disaster – found an “increased prevalence of thyroid cancer, thyroid tumors, depression and suicidal ideation”, as well as “socio-economic problems due to their relocation from radiation-affected areas and inadequate Soviet responses to their health needs”.
Similarities exist between Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia, not only structurally, but also in the existence of “an environment…in which people are discouraged from communicating real problems to superiors”, according to Jonathan Becker, professor of studies. politics at Bard College which teaches both Russian politics and the Chernobyl disaster.
“There is a small thing, which is the munitions hitting the stored radioactive material,” he said, “and there is a bigger one, which is a series of errors, which are reinforced by a system that does not encourage transparent communication”, which was exemplified by the Chernobyl collapse.
Even with the closure of the Zaporizhzhia power plant, the threat of a nuclear disaster does not disappear, neither there nor in several other Ukrainian nuclear power plants.
“We are monitoring each of the other nuclear power plants,” Grossi told reporters this week when asked about the risks to the country’s other nuclear reactors. “We haven’t been informed of a critical situation in those, but we are following this very closely, and when you look at the geography, there are factories that are not that far from military operations.”
De Bretton-Gordon said he supports international demands for a demilitarized zone, specifically calling for a “30-mile exclusion zone around [Zaporizhzhia] piloted by UN and IAEA observers.” But he is skeptical of Putin’s deal.
“Putin is so defensive right now. He has very few ace cards. I think for him Zaporizhzhia is an ace card that he’s not going to give up without a fight.”
While Russia and Ukraine have both expressed ‘interest’ in a ‘commitment that no military action will include or involve targeting…the power plant,’ Grossi said, no agreement has been reached. .
In the event of a disaster in Zaporizhzhia, caused either by an accident or a deliberate attack, residents of nearby Ukrainian towns and villages could face the threat of radiation poisoning immediately or within hours.
In August, the European Union announced it would donate 5.5 million potassium iodine tablets to Ukraine as a preventive measure, according to the Kyiv Post. Those living within 35 miles of the Zaporizhzhia plant – around 400,000 people – began receiving iodine pills from authorities shortly after the announcement.
According to the CDC, idione tablets can be used to protect the thyroid, which is one of the most vulnerable parts of the body after radiation exposure.
In the Chernobyl disaster, 31 people died immediately after the reactor exploded, but countless others suffered from the long-term effects of radiation exposure. The National Research Center for Radiation Medicine in Ukraine found that of more than 319,000 Ukrainian cleaners, 68% were considered healthy in 1988, but 26 years later only 5.5% were still considered healthy. healthy.
De Bretton-Gordon said that in terms of physical build, Zaporizhzhia is a different plant.
“Chernobyl was a very old and relatively small nuclear power plant compared to Zaporizhzhia,” he said.
“Around each [Zaporizhzhia] reactor is a very strong concrete core that is designed… to absorb [radiation]”, he said, but he added that a deep-penetrating missile deliberately fired at the factory would still create “chaos”.
“If there is a massive explosion and a meltdown of all six reactors, then we could see Chernobyl-scale contamination, probably two or three times that,” he said.
Becker agreed, warning that a nuclear disaster in Ukraine would be catastrophic, with “both human and geopolitical” consequences.
“It will be difficult to imagine the way forward after this,” he said.
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