FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
For more than three days, the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, has been without external power supply, which has raised serious concerns about its safety.
As the British newspaper Guardian reports, the longest outage since the start of the war in Ukraine has left the power plant running on diesel generators, which supply power to cooling and security systems.
The last high-voltage line, which crossed the Dnieper River and connected to Ukrainian territory, was destroyed on Tuesday on the Russian-controlled side.
Since then, the plant has been operating with seven of its 18 generators in operation. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said it has enough fuel for about 20 days, but its head, Rafael Grossi, warned that the loss of external power "increases the likelihood of a nuclear accident."
Moscow accuses Kiev of “continuous bombardment” of the region, which Ukraine rejects as unacceptable, dangerous and claims Russia is manufacturing a crisis to consolidate its control. Ukrainian officials have called the nuclear plant a “bargaining card” for the Kremlin, while Greenpeace has called it “a critical and potentially catastrophic new phase.”
Russia, which took over the plant in March 2022, has said it intends to restart the reactors and connect them to the Russian grid, a move that experts say is only possible in peacetime. All reactors are currently in “cold shutdown” for safety reasons.
European regulators, after the Fukushima accident in 2011, had stipulated that a plant must be able to withstand up to 72 hours without external energy. This limit has already been exceeded, something that has never been tested in practice.
According to Ukrainian sources, if the generators fail, the fuel in the six reactors could heat up uncontrollably within weeks, leading to a core meltdown. Although the situation is not directly comparable to Fukushima, where the meltdown occurred within three days due to an earthquake and tsunami that damaged cooling systems, experts warn that the possibility of a nuclear accident remains real.
The Zaporizhia case has also been on the table in talks between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The US president has proposed placing the plant under US control, while Russia seeks to integrate it into its own network.
However, to this day, the plant's security remains dependent on the fragile balance of the war in Ukraine.
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