October 18, 2024
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia resumed shelling near Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, a local official said Wednesday, a day after the U.N. atomic watchdog agency pressed for the warring sides to carve out a safe zone there to prevent a catastrophe.
The city of Nikopol, on the opposite bank of the Dnieper River from Europe’s largest nuclear plant, was fired on with rockets and heavy artillery, regional Gov. Valentyn Reznichenko said. The report could not independently verified.
“There are fires, blackouts and other things at the (plant) that force us to prepare the local population for the consequences of the nuclear danger,” Reznichenko said. Officials in recent days have distributed iodine pills to residents to help protect them in the event of a radiation leak.
The fighting going on around the plant has caused international alarm.
The head of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, warned the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that “something very, very catastrophic could take place” at Zaporizhzhia. The IAEA urged Russia and Ukraine to establish a “nuclear safety and security protection zone” around the plant.
The fear is that the fighting could trigger a disaster on the scale of the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986.
Neither Moscow nor Kiev officials would immediately commit to the idea of a safety zone, saying more details of the proposal were needed.
Because of damage from the fighting, the plant is generating electricity only to power its safety systems, a senior Ukrainian official said. The plant normally relies on external power to run the systems that keep the reactor cores cool and prevent them from melting down.
Any further disruption of power could force the plant to use back-up diesel generators, but that would entail bringing four diesel trucks a day through the fighting, said Oleh Korikov, Ukraine's acting chief inspector for nuclear and radiation safety.
“We could potentially be in a situation where we run out of diesel,” he said. “And this can lead to an accident with damage to the active zone of the reactors and, accordingly, the release of radioactive products into the environment.”
The plant also had to activate its diesel generators late last month because of damage, according to Ukrainian authorities.
Authorities could consider shutting down the plant, Korikov said, without offering details about how that would work.
The plant’s operator, Energoatom, said that despite the shelling, Ukrainian staff still working at the Russian-occupied plant will try in the coming days to restore the supply of external power through at least one of the seven outside lines.
