nuclear-news

Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station is still under threat

 https://www.thenational.scot/news/20899451.zaporizhzhia-nuclear-power-station-still-threat/ By Jane McLeod, 4 Sept 22,

INSPECTORS from the International Atomic Energy Agency are used to risky missions – from the radioactive aftermath of the Fukushima disaster in Japan to the politically-charged Iranian nuclear programme.

But their deployment amid the war in Ukraine to Zaporizhzhia takes the threat to a new level and underscores the lengths to which the organisation will go in attempts to avert a potentially catastrophic nuclear disaster.

The six-month war, sparked by Russia’s invasion of its western neighbour, is forcing international organisations, including the IAEA, to deploy teams during active hostilities in their efforts to impose order around Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, pursue accountability for war crimes and identify the dead.

The Zaporizhzhia plant was once again knocked offline in the early hours yesterday amid sustained shelling that destroyed a key power line and penetrated deep into the plant’s premises, local Russian-backed authorities said.

The IAEA’s mission is meant to help secure the site as Moscow and Kyiv continue to trade blame for shelling at and around the plant.

The plant has repeatedly suffered complete disconnection from Ukraine’s power grid since last week, with the country’s nuclear energy operator Enerhoatom blaming mortar shelling and fires near the site.

Noting that the IAEA sent inspectors to Iraq in 2003 and to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia during fighting, Tariq Rauf, the organisation’s former head of verification and security, said: “This is not the first time that an IAEA team has gone into a situation of armed hostilities. But this situation in Zaporizhzhia, I think it’s the most serious situation where the IAEA has sent people in ever, so it’s unprecedented.”

IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi highlighted the risks on Thursday when he led a team to the sprawling plant in southern Ukraine.

“There were moments when fire was obvious – heavy machine guns, artillery, mortars at two or three times were really very concerning, I would say, for all of us,” he said of his team’s journey through an active war zone to reach the plant.

Speaking to reporters after leaving colleagues inside, he said the agency is “not moving” from the plant from now on, and vowed a “continued presence” of agency experts.

But it remains to be seen what exactly the organisation can accomplish.

Rauf added: “The IAEA cannot force a country to implement or enforce nuclear safety and security standards. They can only advise and then it is up to … the state itself.”

In Ukraine, that is further complicated by the Russian occupation of the power station.

The IAEA is not the only international organisation seeking to locate staff permanently in Ukraine amid the ongoing war.

International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan has visited Ukraine three times, set up an office in the country and sent investigators into a conflict zone to gather evidence amid widespread reports of atrocities. National governments including the Netherlands have sent expert investigators to help the court.

Khan told a United Nations meeting in April: “This is a time when we need to mobilise the law and send it into battle, not on the side of Ukraine against the Russian Federation or on the side of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, but on the side of humanity to protect, to preserve, to shield people … who have certain basic rights.”

September 6, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Collective madness — Zaporizhzhia is the poster child for abandoning the use of nuclear power.

The IAEA team that went to Zaporizhizhia aren’t superheroes and can’t fix what’s broken

Collective madness — Beyond Nuclear International By Linda Pentz Gunter
The deadly peril posed by nuclear power plants embroiled in a war zone — something we have been warning about since before the Russian invasion of Ukraine — just came into even sharper focus.
The continued military activity around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, home to six of Ukraine’s 15 reactors, has raised worldwide concern about the terrible consequences should a missile strike a reactor, or worse, the unprotected irradiated fuel pools or radioactive waste storage casks.

Let’s remember that the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster — the result of the explosion of a single, relatively new unit — has rendered a 1,000 square mile region (the Exlusion Zone) uninhabitable still today and for the foreseeable future. Any one of the Zaporizhzhia reactors contains a far larger radioactive inventory and a more densely packed fuel pool than was the case at Chornobyl. A major breach of any one of the six would release long-lasting radioactive contamination into the environment, forcing permanent evacuations and sickening countless people.

Several obvious conclusions emerge from all this.

1. Nuclear reactors cannot be in a war zone.
2. The consequences of an attack on a nuclear plant could be catastrophic, long-lasting and far-reaching.
3. It is impossible to predict where a war might happen (Lindsey Graham’s recent reckless statements remind us that yes, there could even be (civil) war again here in the US).
4. The odds of a catastrophic failure at a nuclear plant must be zero given the unacceptable consequences; an impossibility.
5. Nuclear power plants are not only ill-suited to the climate of war, but also to both the present and impending extremes of climate change (major sea-level rise; floods; fires; violent weather events etc).

Therefore, it is senseless and irresponsible to continue using nuclear power as an energy source.

Instead, as a 14-person delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) made its way to the Zaporizhzhia plant, its General Secretary, Rafael Grossi, stated that theirs was a mission “that seeks to prevent a nuclear accident and to preserve this important — the largest, the biggest — nuclear power plant in Europe”. 

Preserve? Well, as Henry Sokolski just reminded us in his August 31 article — The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant Is Kindling for World War III — “The IAEA was founded seventy years ago to promote nuclear power.” It is set up to “conduct occasional nuclear audits, not to physically protect plants against military attacks or to demilitarize zones around them,” he wrote. “The IAEA can’t provide the Zaporizhzhia plant with any defenses, nor will it risk keeping IAEA staff on-site to serve as defensive tripwires.”

James Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, issued similar warnings about the limitations of the IAEA delegation when he was interviewed about the worsening situation at Zaporizhzhia and the IAEA visit on the August 29th edition of The Rachel Maddow Show. 

“We should be realistic about what they can achieve,” he said. “It’s their job to report what’s going on in the plant, to assess the safety and security features on the plant and to report back. They don’t have a magic way of defending the plant or repairing broken equipment.”

The White House has called for the Zaporizhzhia reactors to be shut down. It should be calling for all reactors to be shut down. Instead, it is blindly persisting with nuclear power as a present and future energy program. 

The White House is not alone, of course. The illogical — and arguably insane — response to the war in Ukraine by a number of governments has been to insist on the continued or even expanded use of nuclear energy. Given what is at stake in so doing — and given the obvious safer, faster and cheaper alternatives of energy efficiency and renewable energy— this appears to be a symptom of some kind of collective madness.

Let’s face it, if Zaporizhzhia was a 6-acre wind farm instead of a 6-reactor nuclear power plant, we wouldn’t even be talking about it, let alone worrying about how to pronounce it.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and curates Beyond Nuclear International.

September 4, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, Ukraine | Leave a comment