The situation at the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is sliding towards a “Fukushima scenario” and the facility will soon be forced to rely solely on backup power sources, Ukraine’s energy minister said in an interview. Herman Halushchenko said the Zaporizhia plant, Europe’s largest nuclear facility, was now operating “as an island”, capable only of supplying power to itself, leaving the neighboring city of Enerhodar stranded as fighting continued in the region. Soon, according to Mr. Halushchenko, the staff of the Zaporizhzhia station will be forced to shut down its last active reactor, unit No. activation and crash prevention. “It’s a pretty, pretty dangerous situation,” the energy minister told The Globe and Mail on Friday at his office in Kyiv. “Of course, we have a very good emergency electrical survival system, but the idea of diesel generators is that they should run for some not long period of time and then you have to repair the electricity supply.” But repairing the damage to the station was impossible amid ongoing fighting in the area, Mr. Halushchenko said. He said some of the shells landed on the ground of the nuclear plant and several had come “very close” to hitting the facility itself. How did Ukraine turn the tide of the war? “The situation is very close to the Fukushima scenario when it was interrupted [from its] electricity supply and then the diesel generators start working,” he said, referring to the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan, which was triggered by a massive earthquake and tsunami. “After the tsunami [swamped] this generator, the disaster happened. In this situation, the diesel generator is working, but there could be some crazy Russian shelling. “And so a mine or a missile or whatever … could shut down the generators and then you have an hour and probably 30 minutes, no more than two hours, before the reaction starts.” Mr Halushchenko, a former senior official at Energoatom, the state agency that oversees Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, is not alone in trying to sound the alarm about the potential disaster in Zaporizhzhia. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, said on Friday that the fighting around the plant had “significantly increased the risk of a nuclear accident”. Earlier this month, he visited the facility, where the IAEA has two observers. “The bombing puts the operators and their families at risk, making it difficult to adequately staff the plant,” Mr. Grossi said in a video statement, demanding “the bombing stop and a nuclear safety and protection zone be agreed immediately.” Russia and Ukraine have blamed each other for the bombings near the Zaporizhia plant, which has been under the former’s control since March. Mr Halushchenko accused Russia of using the facility as a military base and firing artillery from the factory grounds. Russian forces, he said, frequently shelled the area around the plant, apparently to destroy power lines connecting the Zaporizhzhia station to the Ukrainian power grid. Russian grip on northeast Ukraine crumbles after Kyiv cuts supply line The Zaporizhzhia plant is on the front line of the war in southern Ukraine, across the Dnipro River from the city of Nikopol, which had a population of 115,000 before the war. Mr Halushchenko said the only way to implement the IAEA’s request for a buffer zone around the plant is for it to be demilitarized and returned to Ukrainian control. “It is the first precedent in world history … when a nuclear facility is seized by the military.” Mr Halushchenko said his office was in daily contact with Ukrainian staff who continue to work inside the plant and who, he added, “are exhausted due to moral and physical pressure” – escalating the possibility of human error at the facility. The specter of nuclear disaster is particularly poignant in Ukraine, where many are still haunted by memories of the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the north of the country. This mothball plant also briefly fell into Russian possession at the beginning of the war. Mr. Halushchenko said that when he visited shortly after Russian troops left the facility in April, he was shocked by the apparent disregard they had shown for basic nuclear safety. He added that retreating Russian troops had looted the power plant, stealing computers and other technology before attempting to destroy what they could not carry. Chernobyl is now back under Ukrainian control and IAEA monitoring, but Mr Halushchenko said a second disaster may have been avoided only because the Russians did not know what was and was not important to the safety of the facility. “It looks like they didn’t know what to destroy,” he said. Russian forces had also dug trenches and filled sandbags with highly radioactive soil from the factory grounds. Mr. Halushchenko predicted that some of those who had taken over Chernobyl were either extremely ill now, or soon would be, because of the high doses of radiation they would have received. Ukrainian forces have seized an expanding swath of previously Russian-controlled territory in the east in a “very sharp and rapid” advance, a regional official based in Russia said on Friday, in a major breakthrough that could mark a turning point in the war. Reuters
