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. “We don't want our nuclear power plants to come under assault, to be on fire, and to not have first responders be able to access them,” he said.Īnother 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. The reactors at the plant have thick concrete containment domes, which would have protected them from external fire from tanks and artillery, said Jon Wolfsthal, who served during the Obama administration as the senior director for arms control and nonproliferation at the National Security Council.Īt the same time, a fire at a nuclear power plant is never a good thing, he said. Four of the other six reactors have now been taken offline, leaving only one in operation. The reactor that was hit was offline, but still contains highly radioactive nuclear fuel. “It is of critical importance that the armed conflict and activities on the ground around Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and any other of Ukraine’s nuclear facilities in no way interrupts or endangers the facilities or the people working at and around them,” he said. “However, as you can imagine, the operator and the regulator have been telling us that the situation naturally continues to be extremely tense and challenging.”Įarlier this week, Grossi already had warned that the IAEA was “gravely concerned” with Russian forces conducting military operations so close nearby. “All of the safety systems of the six reactors at the plant were not affected at all and there has been no release of radioactive material,” he said. Initially, firefighters were not able to get near the flames because they were being shot at, Tuz said.Īfter speaking with Ukrainian authorities on Friday, Rafael Grossi, the director general of the IAEA, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, said a building next to the reactors was hit and not a reactor itself. Plant spokesman Andriy Tuz told Ukrainian television that early Friday morning, shells fell directly on the facility and set fire to one of its six reactors. Later Friday, Ukrainian authorities said Russia had taken over the nuclear plant. A failure of those systems could lead to a disaster similar to that of Japan's Fukushima plant, when a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011 destroyed cooling systems, triggering meltdowns in three reactors. One major concern, raised by Ukraine's state nuclear regulator, is that if fighting interrupts power supply to the nuclear plant, it would be forced to use less-reliable diesel generators to provide emergency power to operating cooling systems. "They still went into a pitch black, badly damaged basement beneath a molten reactor core that was slowly burning its way down to them," he said.BANGKOK (AP) - Europe's largest nuclear power plant was hit by Russian shelling early Friday, sparking a fire and raising fears of a disaster that could affect all of central Europe for decades, like the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown.Ĭoncerns faded after Ukrainian authorities announced that the fire had been extinguished, and while there was damage to the reactor compartment, the safety of the unit was not affected.īut even though the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant is of a different design than Chernobyl and is protected from fire, nuclear safety experts and the International Atomic Energy Agency warn that waging war in and around such facilities presents extreme risks. In addition, Leatherbarrow said the best sources out there have yet to be translated from Russian - including the accounts of senior managers, state-run media reports, and a book by an engineer who's been blamed for the disaster, but insists he was scapegoated by the government.Įven so, Leatherbarrow added, these men risked their lives to save untold millions of lives during a disaster of unheard of magnitude. Leatherbarrow said that he lost track of the third man, but that he was alive at least up until 2015.Ĭomplicating this is the contradictory reports from English media and the Soviet government, which famously tried to downplay the disaster. It often indicates a user profile.Īs for the other two men, Leatherbarrow said one is still alive and working in the industry, but he hasn't released his name because of privacy concerns. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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