KYIV, Ukraine – Ukraine’s state nuclear energy company said on Friday Russia is preparing to disconnect power lines at the giant Zaporizhzhia power plant from Ukraine’s power grid, a complicated and potentially risky process. could deprive government-controlled territories of power and redirect it to Crimea. and Russia.
The Russians will have to shut down the reactors at the plant to reroute the power. That means the power to keep the cooling systems running at the plant will come from diesel generators, increasing the risk of an accident at a facility in a war zone where the public works. employees are working in a difficult situation.
Ukraine has warned for some time that Russia may want to pull the plant off its grid, and on Friday, the Ukrainian energy company, Energoatom, said it had evidence that “the Russian military is looking.” supplier of diesel generator fuel,” in what it said was a clear signal that they may be preparing for two operating reactors to shut down.
Ukraine’s statement about Russia’s intentions could not be independently verified and Moscow was not immediately available for comment. However, a top local industry official said he opposed shutting down the reactor.
The Interfax news agency quoted Yevgeny Balitsky, head of the occupied areas of the Zaporizka region designated by the Russians: “A nuclear power plant should not be destroyed. It is unclear how long he was talking about.
Senior Russian officials have said that Russian military control of the plant is the best guarantee of its safety, accusing Ukraine and its ally the US of creating conditions. event that could cause another Chernobyl, the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine that the Soviet Union. initially tried to hide.
When asked about Ukraine’s statement during a trip to the port city of Odesa, the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, said that “it is clear that the electricity from Zaporizhzhia is Ukraine’s electricity” and that it should be respected.
The immediate consequences of the outage will be on the Ukrainian power grid, especially in the southern regions, where power outages are likely. The plant, when fully operational, provides about 10% of Ukraine’s electricity needs, with the capacity to power 4 million homes.
Of greater concern, however, is the potential for a recession if something goes wrong in an attempt to keep the plant running with diesel generators. It is not publicly known how much diesel fuel is at the plant, and with Russia’s supply lines under constant attack by Ukrainian troops, it is not clear if it can be transported to the site as easily. how.
According to nuclear experts, done strictly according to long-established protocols, going down to a nuclear reactor does not carry great risks. But the factory’s conditions, damaged in recent shelling, were far from ideal. And the Ukrainian engineers, who will likely have to carry out the tasks, worked in difficult conditions.
A power failure during the shutdown of the reactor could cause a failure of the plant’s cooling system. There could be a scenario similar to the one that occurred in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, when the loss of coolant resulted in three reactors experiencing some degree of core meltdown, nuclear experts say.
However, after that disaster, Ukraine upgraded the Zaporizhzhia site so that it could shut down even if the cooling water was lost from outside the containment structures, Dmytro Gortenko, a former plant engineer, said in an interview.
Tensions around the nuclear power plant on the frontline escalated this week as the Russian and Ukrainian militaries traded allegations that each side was preparing to carry out an attack on the plant in the coming days, risking catastrophic radioactive release.
The Russian Defense Ministry announced that the Ukrainian military was preparing a “terrorist attack” on the vast Zaporizhzhia complex, prompting Ukraine’s military intelligence service to reply that the Russian warning was in fact a pretext for Moscow to carry out some “provocative action” there. on Friday.
Russia has rejected international calls for its forces to withdraw from the facility and create a demilitarized zone. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Friday that such an area would only increase the risk of a nuclear disaster, claiming that the presence of the country’s military was “a guarantee that it will There is no such scenario happening.”
