Fears of a major nuclear reactor disaster in the middle of the war in Ukraine took on a frightening possibility on early Friday.
With the world riveted to security camera views of a fire, and fighting, at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, fears of damage to the reactors ricocheted around the globe. Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that a disaster there “will be 10 times larger than Chornobyl!” By morning, the fire was extinguished, Russian forces had taken control of the plant, and its safety equipment was stable, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. No radiation releases were reported from the facility. But the fear remains.
“We are in completely uncharted waters,” said Rafael Mariano Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in a Friday news briefing. “The physical integrity of the plant has been compromised with what happened last night,” Grossi said. “We, of course, are fortunate that there was no release of radiation and that the integrity of the reactors in themselves was not compromised.”
Grossi also offered to personally travel to Chornobyl (often transliterated from Russian as “Chernobyl”), the 1986 site of the world’s worst nuclear accident, to work out safeguards for the nuclear power facilities in the war-torn nation.
In the US, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm activated the agency’s Nuclear Incident Response Team, and said the US Department of Defense and other agencies are closely monitoring radiation levels reported from the plant. She later expressed support for the IAEA’s calls to allow Ukrainian operators to continue working at Russian-captured nuclear facilities. The Energy Department team monitored instruments near the plant with IAEA and Ukrainian officials, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration spokesman Gordon Trowbridge, allowing them to report no leaks.
