![]() “Anybody who understands nuclear safety issues has been trembling for the last six months,” Mycle Schneider, a consultant and coordinator of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, said before the latest incident. The three regular transmission lines at the plant are out of service because of previous war damage. The U.N.’s International Atomic Agency said Ukraine informed it that the reactors’ emergency protection systems were triggered, and all safety systems remained operational. Many nuclear plants are designed to automatically shut down or at least reduce reactor output in the event of a loss of outgoing transmission lines. A loss of cooling could cause a nuclear meltdown.Īs a result of the transmission-line damage, the two reactors still in use out of the plant’s six went offline, Balitsky said, but one was quickly restored, as was electricity to the region. A backup line supplying electricity from another plant remained in place, Energoatom said.īut Zelenskyy’s mention of the emergency generators being activated raised questions of whether the cooling systems were endangered. It was not immediately clear whether the damaged line carried outgoing electricity or incoming power, needed for the reactors’ vital cooling systems. Zaporizhzhia’s Russian-installed regional governor, Yevgeny Balitsky, blamed the transmission-line damage on a Ukrainian attack. “Russia has put Ukraine and all Europeans one step away from a radiation disaster,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy blamed Russian shelling and said the plant’s emergency backup diesel generators had to be activated to supply power needed to run the plant. On Thursday, the plant was cut off from the electrical grid after fires damaged the last operating regular transmission line, according to Ukraine’s nuclear power agency, Energoatom.
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