Attack on Iran's Bushehr reactor would spell disaster

The recklessness of the US and Israeli bombing attacks on Iran that now threaten to potentially destroy the Bushehr commercial nuclear power plant there, represents a radiological risk of monumental proportions, warned Beyond Nuclear today.

The 1,000 megawatt Russian built VVER reactor sits on the Iranian coast. It is the same design as the reactors in Ukraine where alarm has already been raised by the International Atomic Energy Agency and other international authorities, should any be struck or seriously damaged by Russian missiles as the war in Ukraine continues to drag on.

But there has been significantly less international comment about the similar risks at Bushehr, a disturbing trend as the US president dispenses with all the norms and protocols of war and threatens to obliterate all of Iran's critical infrastructure including power plants by midnight on Tuesday if no agreement with Iran is met by then.

“Hitting the Bushehr civil nuclear power plant would be a war crime,” said Linda Pentz Gunter, executive director of Beyond Nuclear. “The Geneva Convention specifically defines a war crime to include hitting facilities that, if damaged or destroyed, would result in extensive loss of non-combatant life,” Pentz Gunter added. “A commercial nuclear power plant certainly falls into this category.”

The particular dangers at Bushehr stem from the highly radioactive uranium fuel inside the reactor and stored in cooling pools and on-site casks. Any extended loss of power caused by an attack or a direct hit could see the fuel overheat and ignite, potentially leading to explosions. The resulting radiological releases would result in long-lasting radioactive fallout affecting vast areas in Iran, neighboring countries and beyond, contaminating agricultural land as well as sea water, an essential drinking water source for a region that relies on desalination.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s director general, Rafael Grossi, has called for restraint, citing the "Seven Indispensable Pillars” he created to try to discourage attacks on nuclear power plants.

“Secretary Grossi is ignoring two key factors,” Pentz Gunter said. “The first is that the IAEA actively promotes the use and expansion of nuclear power around the world, so the agency must take responsibility for its role in the extreme danger we have found ourselves in, first in Ukraine and now Iran, with nuclear plants embroiled in war. Second, the “seven pillars” make an assumption we can now recognize as entirely unreliable — that the world leaders expected to abide by these protocols are sane and rational.

“Grossi is effectively clinging to his pillars like a barrelman hanging onto the mast of a storm-tossed ship about to hit the rocks while his cries of alarm are drowned out by the mayhem around him," Pentz Gunter said.

Nuclear meltdowns deposit radioactive contamination where the wind blows, coming down during rainfall as fallout. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power disaster resulted in a 1,000 square mile exclusion zone, still too radiologically contaminated for human habitation even today.

Japan experienced a triple meltdown in March 2011, when three of the four Fuskushima Daiichi reactors exploded. The long gestation period for some diseases caused by persistent exposure to radiation, means that the true health outcomes from that disaster, whether fatalities or debilitating diseases, will not be known for many years.

“To set up the possibility of another Chernobyl or Fukushima in the Middle East is criminally irresponsible,” Pentz Gunter concluded. “And even though we know Iran’s nuclear facilities were merely the pretext for the US-Israeli attack, we must remember that it was President Trump during his first term who effectively tore up a perfectly effective nuclear inspection and verification agreement — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — that ensured Iran stayed within the boundaries of a civil nuclear program. Maintaining the JCPOA would have been the sensible way to keep those nuclear safeguards in place.”