NIKOPOL, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainians are once again anxious about the fate of a nuclear power plant in a land that was home to the world’s worst atomic accident in 1986 at Chernobyl — and alarm only increased Thursday when the plant operator said the facility has been cut off from the electrical grid.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, 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.
On Thursday, the plant was cut off from the power grid for the first time after fires damaged the only working transmission line, according to Ukraine’s nuclear power operator. It was not clear if the plant had been reconnected. As long as it remains off the grid, it will have to rely on emergency diesel generators to run cooling systems that are essential for the safe operation of the reactors.
The cutoff underscored concerns about the plant, which the government in Kyiv alleges Russia is essentially holding hostage, storing weapons there and launching attacks from around it. Moscow, meanwhile, 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,” Mycle Schneider, an independent policy consultant and coordinator of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, said before the latest incident at the plant.
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. Still, an ongoing conflict near a working atomic plant is troubling for many experts who fear that a damaged facility could lead to a disaster.
That fear is palpable just across the Dnieper River in Nikopol, where residents have been under nearly constant Russian shelling since July 12, with eight people killed, 850 buildings damaged and over the half the population of 100,000 fleeing the city.
Liudmyla Shyshkina, a 74-year-old widow who lived within sight of the Zaporizhzhia plant before her apartment was bombarded and her husband killed, said she believes the Russians are capable of intentionally causing a nuclear disaster.
Fighting in early March caused a brief fire at the plant’s training complex that officials said did not result in the release of any radiation. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy 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 — like the one nuclear power operator, Energoatom, reported Thursday that meant two remaining reactors at the plant were disconnected from the grid.
The operator said it couldn’t immediately comment on the operation of safety systems at the plant, where emergency diesel generators are sometimes unreliable.
External power is essential not just to cool the two reactors still in operation but also the spent radioactive fuel stored in special facilities onsite — and only one of the plant’s four power lines connecting it to the grid has been operational.
“If we lose the last one, we are at the total mercy of emergency power generators,” said Najmedin Meshkati, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Southern California.
Another concern about the fighting nearby is that 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 U.N.’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.
