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Military offensives increase nuclear accident odds in Ukraine, warns atomic safety chief

Rafael Mariano Grossi wants ‘every’ EU country to push for a security buffer around the occupied Zaporizhzhia plant.

POLITICO, BY VICTOR JACK, JANUARY 25, 2023 

The risk of an accident at Ukraine’s Russia-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant will “undoubtedly” increase as both Kyiv and Moscow prepare for military offensives in the coming months, warned the chief of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog.

“There is a lot of talk about bigger, larger maneuvers and action in the early spring or late winter,” Rafael Mariano Grossi, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general, told POLITICO, “which makes me think that any increase in bombing and shelling will undoubtedly increase the possibility of a nuclear accident.”

Russia is likely to launch a fresh push to take Ukrainian territory this spring, a top NATO official said last week, while Ukraine also says it is readying a major counter-offensive……………………………………….

Earlier this month, Petro Kotin, president of Ukraine’s state-run Energoatom nuclear operator, said a U.N. security buffer was not “realistic” and instead called for Ukraine’s forces to take the facility back by force.

But Grossi warned that any attack “puts the installation at great risk.”

He’s pressing for EU foreign ministers to get involved and use their “own channels of communication” with Ukraine and Russia to “pass the message … that avoiding a nuclear accident is a must” and a security zone is needed.

Grossi also addressed the increasingly frequent calls from Russian propagandists and some politicians that Moscow should respond to its battlefield setbacks by unleashing its nuclear weapons.

“I don’t see how a conventional war — no matter how dramatic it is — between a non-nuclear weapon state and a nuclear weapon state could … justify the use of nuclear weapons,” he said. https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-war-military-nuclear-accident-atomic-safety-chief-rafael-mariano-grossi/

January 27, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, Ukraine, weapons and war