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zaporizhzhia
'A Dangerous Nuclear Crisis': Greenpeace Warns Zaporizhzhia Insufficiently Monitored
A new report found that Russian troops were likely "using the plant as a shield" in violation of the safety principles laid out by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Sep 28, 2023
The Russian forces occupying Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant have been violating the safety principles established by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the watchdog body has not been able to effectively monitor the situation.
That's the warning from a new Greenpeace report sent to Western leaders on Thursday, which argues that the IAEA needs to be more upfront about the reality of the situation.
"The IAEA reporting risks normalizing what remains a dangerous nuclear crisis, unprecedented in the history of nuclear power, while exaggerating its actual influence on events on the ground," wrote report authors Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist from Greenpeace East Asia, and Jan Vande Putte, a Greenpeace Belgium radiation and nuclear expert.
Russian forces seized the Zaporizhzhia plant on March 4, 2022, less than a month into the invasion.
"Since 2022 we have been deeply concerned by the multiple hazards and risks to the Zaporozhzhia nuclear plant posed by the Russian armed forces and the Russian state nuclear corporation, Rosatom," Burnie and Putte wrote.
To address these concerns, Greenpeace Germany commissioned former U.K. military specialists at McKenzie Intelligence Services to report on conditions at the plant.
"The Russian armed forces and Rosatom occupation pose a constant nuclear threat to Zaporozhzhia and must be condemned."
The result, Greenpeace said, "provides detailed evidence that the Zaporizhizhia nuclear plant is being used strategically and tactically by Russian armed forces in its illegal war against Ukraine."
For example, the report found that Russian troops were firing from positions between one and 18 kilometers (approximately 0.6 to 11 miles) from the plant, had constructed small defensive positions with sandbags on the roofs of some of the reactor halls, and are using a type of truck near the plant that is commonly used to transport weapons and combustible material.
It also concluded that both Russian forces and Rosatom are acting in violation of the five principles that IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi laid out in June to prevent a nuclear accident at the plant.
These principles are:
- No launching attacks from or at the plant;
- No storing weapons at the plant;
- No threatening outside power sources;
- Making sure all important structures are protected; and
- No taking actions that go against these principles.
McKenzie found evidence that Russian forces have a firing pattern of settling in one location, attacking from another, and then moving again to avoid counterattacks. In this process, they appear to be "using the plant as a shield."
"All activity observed over the reporting period does suggest a precarious environment continues to exist at the plant," Burnie and Putte concluded.
The Greenpeace experts also reviewed the IAEA's monitoring in the context of McKenzie's findings, and argued that the agency could be more upfront about its limitations and Russia's violations.
IAEA only has four monitors for the largest nuclear plant on the continent, and they must conduct their investigation with restrictions placed on their movements and access, as well as the requirement that they make access requests a week in advance.
Despite all this, Burnie said in a statement, "the director general's reporting is incomplete and misleading, including the assessment of Russian noncompliance with safety and security principles."
"The Russian armed forces and Rosatom occupation pose a constant nuclear threat to Zaporozhzhia and must be condemned—but currently the IAEA is unable to fully report on the security and safety hazards they pose," Burnie continued. "That has to change."
The advocacy group prepared the report ahead of an IAEA discussion of the situation in Ukraine in Vienna Thursday, as well as the IAEA Board of Governors meeting October 2. On Wednesday night, Greenpeace sent copies to the board's member governments, The Guardian reported.
IAEA did not comment on the report directly. However, it told The Guardian that, without its inspectors stationed there since September 2022, "the world would have no independent source of information about Europe's largest nuclear power plant."
However, Greenpeace argued the agency could take steps to improve that information.
"Greenpeace is calling on the IAEA board member governments to review the scale and scope of the IAEA mission, and to work with member states, and in particular the government of Ukraine, to institute whatever measures that will bring maximum pressure to bear on the Russian armed forces and Rosatom at the plant and to bring about an early end to the current military occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant," Burnie and Putte wrote.
These measures could include an improved analysis by the IAEA and sanctions against Rosatom, Greenpeace said.
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When it Comes to Ukranian Claims, Tell the Truth, Don’t Cheerlead
The Western Press, government officials, and others must be far more circumspect around reporting on claims from Ukrainian officials, lest another incident in the fog of war threaten to widen the conflict.
Jul 13, 2023
The war in Ukraine is at a dangerous crossroads. The outcome on the battlefield is increasingly tied to the political survival and prestige of all principal warring parties, including President Joe Biden, who is on the verge of crossing more self-imposed lines on arms transfers.
Kyiv, meanwhile, is in the middle of an underwhelming offensive that it’s been previously told may mark the end of U.S. military aid. All the while, a ceasefire is publicly rejected by leaders who cast it as unacceptable.
It’s in this context that top Ukrainian officials’ charges of Moscow orchestrating an impending nuclear catastrophe has reached a fever pitch. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently cited alleged intelligence to announce that Russia was “technically ready to provoke a local explosion” at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which has been controlled by Russian forces since March last year.
Zelensky’s claim was uncritically broadcast in headlines from American news outlets like Reuters, The Guardian, New York Post, ABC, and Newsweek, as well as foreign outlets like Al Jazeera, the Independent, the Australian Financial Review, and The Jerusalem Post.
The war has now reached a point where the press must take greater care in how they treat Ukrainian officials’ claims, especially in cases like this. An explosion at the plant may not only cause a near-unprecedented environmental catastrophe, but could also be used by hawks to argue for direct U.S. or NATO involvement in the war.
This follows on from earlier, identical claims by the Ukrainian leader not only in these same outlets, but in major mainstream newspapers like The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Much of this coverage not only puts Kyiv’s accusations in the headline, but frames the entire story around them, implicitly front-loading the charge with authority, while introducing countervailing facts only further down, if they’re mentioned at all.
The average reader, as a result, is left with little reason to doubt his claims.
That’s despite International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi saying on June 29 that he “didn’t see that kind of development,” referring to Zelensky’s claims that Moscow was planning an attack, when he and his team recently inspected the plant. Only two of the above outlets—ABC and Newsweek—bothered to mention Grossi’s remarks in their reports, many paragraphs in.
Grossi weighed in again on July 5, saying that teams had inspected the facility “so far without observing any visible indications of mines or explosives,” according to an IAEA statement.
In contrast to Zelensky’s charges, Grossi’s assessment has gone almost completely unreported, and has, with some notable exceptions, similarly been left out of coverage of Zelensky and others’ more recent accusations of Russian forces planting explosives, with stories once more tending to frame the charges uncritically.
The New York Post, in fact, mentioned Grossi in its story only to paint him as ineffective, relying heavily on quotes from Zelensky adviser Mykhailo Podolyak.
This mirrors earlier coverage. The culprit behind the nuclear plant’s shelling last year was treated as a mystery by the press, either ascribed to a mysterious force or outlets reporting that both sides blamed the other. The London Times eventually revealed Ukraine’s secret and “desperate attempt to retake the facility” at the time this past April. Journalists understandably sympathetic to the Ukrainian war effort may have been loath to give Ukrainian forces negative publicity or appear to give credence to Russian claims.
But the war has now reached a point where the press must take greater care in how they treat Ukrainian officials’ claims, especially in cases like this. An explosion at the plant may not only cause a near-unprecedented environmental catastrophe, but could also be used by hawks to argue for direct U.S. or NATO involvement in the war.
On July 4, in the midst of Kyiv’s headline-grabbing charges, former congressman and current CNN senior political commentator Adam Kinzinger urged that “every single living Russia[n] solider or Russian piece of equipment in Ukraine becomes extremely destroyed by NATO” if Moscow causes an explosion at the plant. Indeed, Zelensky himself has called on world leaders to show Moscow “the world is ready to react” to such an attack.
Not only do Ukrainian officials, who have long called for NATO’s direct entry in the war, have a rational incentive to draw their military backers directly into the fighting, but there have already been numerous other examples of Kyiv falsely blaming Russia for attacks Ukraine itself was responsible for. Maybe most alarming was in November, after a stray air defense missile launched by Ukrainian forces accidentally killed two people in Poland.
That incident, coupled with thinly sourced and ultimately erroneous reporting based on the word of an unnamed U.S. intelligence official, was quickly declared a deliberate Russian attack on NATO by both hawkish commentators and senior officials from Ukraine and NATO member states, some of whom called for the alliance to respond directly. Kyiv refused to admit fault for the incident despite NATO concluding Ukrainian-fired rockets were the culprit.
It was the most dangerous instance, but far from the only one. Kyiv also swiftly blamed Russia for the attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines last September, a charge repeated by European officials, print media, and countless talking heads on U.S. television, before Western officials all but absolved Moscow and evidence emerged that Europe and the United States had had advance knowledge of a Ukrainian military plot for the attack.
Ukrainian officials likewise accused Russians of responsibility for attacks on what Moscow considers its own soil, namely the October 2022 suicide bombing of the Kerch Strait Bridge and the May 2023 drone attack on the Kremlin, both of which U.S. intelligence ultimately concluded was Kyiv’s doing, and the latter of which was widely suggested to be a Kremlin false flag in the mainstream press.
Ukrainian officials similarly claimed no connection to the group of anti-Putin far right Russian extremists who carried out attacks in Russia’s Belgorod region earlier this year, even though they used NATO-provided arms and its leader admitted getting “a lot of encouragement” from Ukrainian authorities. Often, news of Ukrainian culpability came long after the initial claims of Russian guilt were widely disseminated.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that Russian forces could be responsible for any theoretical future explosion at the Zaporizhzhia plant, however strategically confounding it might seem, just as it was possible for Moscow to be behind attacks on its own pipeline, bridge, and government building. But given the track record of past claims and the stakes involved here, it would be irresponsible and imprudent in the extreme to simply assume Russian blame is the truth, or to immediately present it as such.
This is doubly so given that Kyiv has made a host of factually dubious statements throughout the war on other matters. As just one example, officials, including Zelensky, made repeated, conflicting statements early last month about whether or not their spring offensive had even begun, with Podolyak flatly contradicting himself in the space of two weeks.
This is hardly scandalous. All government officials dissemble and deceive, particularly in wartime, and Ukraine’s proficiency at “information warfare” has been widely remarked upon in the West. Meanwhile, Russian officials have their own, very long list of dubious claims. The difference is, Moscow’s statements are treated in the West with appropriate skepticism and caution, the kind that should be applied to all government claims, particularly during war.
The Western press, government officials, and other prominent voices have to be far more circumspect around reporting on claims from Ukrainian officials, particularly should another incident in the fog of war threaten to widen the conflict. Understandable sympathy for the Ukrainian war effort shouldn’t supersede the core, fundamental task of reporting, which is to tell the truth, not cheerlead. The stakes are simply too high.
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A Military Attack on Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant Would Be a Disaster Beyond Description
It is imperative that the international community take Ukraine’s warnings seriously and provide all the assistance it needs for emergency preparedness
Jul 08, 2023
Ukraine has accused Russia of planning to carry out a sabotage attack at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant that it has controlled since it seized it by force in March 2022. Although it reports this morning that this current threat is decreasing, the situation is fluid and the plant remains vulnerable to both accidents and attacks. While this ongoing crisis should not lead to panic, there is no cause for complacency either. Unfortunately, the American Nuclear Society (ANS) and other commenters have been busy attempting to dismiss the risks that either an accident or a deliberate attack could lead to a significant radiological release with far-reaching consequences. Simply put, the ANS is dead wrong here, and by minimizing the potential risk it is endangering Ukrainians and others who may be affected by lulling them into a false sense of security and undermining any motivation to prepare for the worst. Effective emergency preparedness requires a clear-eyed understanding of the actual threat.
As I have pointed out previously, the fact that the six reactors have been in shutdown mode for many months (with one in “hot”, as opposed to “cold,” shutdown) does reduce the risk somewhat compared to a situation where reactors are operating or have only recently shut down. The decay heat in the reactors’ cores decreases significantly over time, although the rate of decrease slows down quite a bit after a few months. However, this does not mean, as ANS misleadingly implies, that there is no risk of a major radiological release that could disperse over a wide area. What it does mean is that if cooling were disrupted to one or more of the reactors, then there would be a longer period of time—days instead of hours—for operators to fix the problem before the cooling water in the reactor cores would start to boil away and drop below the tops of the fuel assemblies, causing the fuel to overheat and degrade.
Effective emergency preparedness requires a clear-eyed understanding of the actual threat.
Timely operator actions are even more critical for reactors that are shut down than for reactors that are operating, since some automatic safety systems are not functional during shutdown. Indeed, in a 1997 report, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) points out that “acceptable results for most of events during shutdown modes cannot be achieved without operator intervention.” The IAEA report states that both “preventive and mitigatory capabilities are somewhat degraded” in shutdown conditions, and lists a number of shutdown accident initiators for VVER-1000s.
One class of events of particular concern are “boron dilution” accidents, in which the concentration of boron in cooling water necessary to maintain reactors in a subcritical state becomes reduced and nuclear fission inadvertently begins in the core. This would not only increase the reactor temperature and the amount of heat that would have to be removed, but would also generate new quantities of troublesome short-lived fission products, such as iodine isotopes, which have previously decayed away in the months since shutdown. (This is why it remains important that potassium iodide—a drug that can block uptake of radioactive iodine in the thyroid—continue to be available to communities who may be in the path of any plume.) It is also important to note that it is very unusual for reactors to be maintained for any length of time in either hot or cold shutdown modes with fuel remaining in the core, as is the case at Zaporizhzhia. Whenever nuclear reactors operate in unusual conditions that have not been thoroughly analyzed, risks increase.
There is no technical reason why any resulting radioactive releases could not disperse at least as far as occurred at Fukushima, depending on the meteorological conditions
Unfortunately, because of the incredible stress that the greatly reduced staff at Zaporizhzhia are under, and the unclear lines of command under Russian occupation, their ability to efficiently execute all the actions necessary to mitigate any accident or sabotage attack is in grave doubt. And if timely operator intervention does not occur, and the fuel assemblies are exposed, then a core melt accident similar to what was experienced in three of the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi is certainly possible. Once the water level has dropped below the tops of the fuel assemblies, the original decay heat in the reactor core is no longer a relevant factor because when the zirconium cladding surrounding the fuel rods overheats and reacts with steam or air, it produces additional heat through a so-called exothermic reaction. The heat released in this way would soon become far greater than the original decay heat load and would accelerate the heat-up and degradation of the reactor core. At that point, it would be much harder for operators to arrest the progression of the core melt. Eventually, the molten core would drop to the floor of the steel reactor vessel and melt through it onto the floor of the containment building, where it would react with concrete to generate hot gases. Then, there are multiple ways in which the radioactive gases and aerosols generated during the core melt could be released into the environment, including a containment melt-through mode that is possible in VVER-1000 reactors such as Zaporizhzhia.
There is no technical reason why any resulting radioactive releases could not disperse at least as far as occurred at Fukushima, depending on the meteorological conditions. The heat of the radioactive plumes, which determines how high they will rise in the atmosphere and hence how far they can travel, largely come from the heat released by zirconium oxidation. The magnitude and extent of the resulting environmental contamination would depend on the “source term,” or the inventory and characteristics of the radioactive materials released from the site. Since up to six reactors and six spent fuel pools could be involved—especially if the site is deliberately sabotaged—the source term could ultimately be larger than that of Fukushima, where only three reactors were involved and containments remained largely intact.
Thus it is imperative that the international community take Ukraine’s warnings seriously and provide all the assistance it needs for emergency preparedness. Unjustified complacency could lead to a lack of resolve for addressing the danger, only increasing the potential for a long-lasting disaster that will compound the misery of the Ukrainian people.
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