CHERNOBYL UKRAINE. Fires broke out near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant this Sunday, March 27, 2022. The public authorities have requested the “demilitarization” of the sector under the aegis of the UN, while the area has been under Russian control since the first the day of the invasion, February 24.
[Mis à jour le 28 mars 2022, à 16h21] New fires broke out in the area of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on Sunday March 27, 2022, following bombardments, according to the Ukrainian authorities. Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister wrote on Telegram overnight from Sunday to Monday: “Significant fires have started in the exclusion zone, which can have very serious consequences”, before continuing: “Therefore , we demand that the UN Security Council take immediate steps to demilitarize the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), however, wanted to be reassuring on Sunday. She considered that the security situation in Ukrainian nuclear power plants remained unchanged. Already last week, she stressed that the forest fires around Chernobyl did not pose a major radiological risk.
The situation at the Chernobyl plant has been of concern to the international community since the region and the complex were taken by the Russian army on February 24, the first day of the invasion of Ukraine. In addition to the bombardments which raised fears of damage to the plant itself, maintaining an optimal level of security on the site raises many concerns.
On Tuesday, March 8, 2022, the AEIA reported that the systems for remotely monitoring nuclear materials at the Chernobyl power plant have stopped transmitting data. Rafael Grossi, the head of the IAEA also indicated that “the remote transmission of data from the safeguards control systems installed at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant” had also “been cut”. To date, transmissions have still not been restored, but data is being transferred to the IAEA from the other nuclear power plants inUkraine.
On Wednesday March 9, 2022, several media including Le Monde reported that the power supply to the nuclear power plant and its safety equipment was “completely” cut off due to the fighting, quoting a message from the National Nuclear Energy Production Company of Ukraine (Energatom) on Telegram. For several days, plant personnel had to rely on generators to operate their safety systems. Energatom warned of the risk of “release of radioactive substances into the environment”. The site’s power supply was finally restored on Sunday 13 March.
On Monday March 21, 2022, the IAEA, through its director general Rafael Grossi, indicated that some of the employees of the plant had been relieved. Since the arrival of the Russians, a hundred employees were indeed blocked on the Chernobyl site, managing daily operations without benefiting from the slightest rotation. This Monday, March 28, the same Rafael Grossi is worried that the personnel who arrived in the area last week could not in turn be relayed, because the town of Slavutytch where the agents reside is surrounded by the Russian army. The regulator therefore denounces the state of stress of the employees of the site.
Since Sunday, March 27, fires declared following bombardments, in the exclusion zone, close to the plant itself, are the subject of new concerns.
After the Russians arrived at Chernobyl on February 24, an adviser to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, Anton Gerashchenko, reminded the Washington Post that the plant, although shut down, still had storage facilities for “radioactive waste dangerous nuclear weapons”. Waste sheltered in a gigantic sarcophagus which was only fully completed in 2019.
In the hours following the capture of Chernobyl, Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said it was “impossible to say that the nuclear power plant” had remained “safe”. He called the onslaught of the Russian army in the area “the most serious threat” not only for Ukraine but also for Europe. Remarks taken up in substance by Volodymyr Zelensky himself on the same day on social networks. For its part, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was moved by the risk of a new “ecological disaster”.
The Ukrainian nuclear agency and the Ukrainian government indicated above all on Friday February 25 that the radiation measured very regularly in Chernobyl and the surrounding area was beginning to increase (up to 9.46 microSieverts per hour). A phenomenon that several experts have explained by the passage of Russian troops and armored vehicles, which would have raised radioactive dust still present in the contaminated soils of the region. These levels of radioactivity nevertheless remained harmless and localized in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, ie a radius of 30 km around the old power plant.
The end of communications and especially the power outage reported on March 8 and 9 have revived concern around the plant. Energatom, Ukraine’s National Nuclear Power Company, expressed concern about a potential lack of fuel cooling and warned of the risk of “release of radioactive substances into the environment” and possible “radioactive cloud” that the sale could transfer “to other regions of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Europe”. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nevertheless reassured on Twitter in the afternoon indicating that it saw “no critical impact on safety” given that “the thermal load of the spent fuel storage pool and the volume of cooling water at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are sufficient for efficient heat removal”. An analysis shared by Karine Herviou, Deputy Director General of the French Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN), interviewed by AFP in mid-March, who believes that “the lasting loss of the site’s power supply does not (would cause) no accident”, “unlike nuclear power plants in operation”.
The Chernobyl nuclear waste storage pool is nevertheless in question. According to an engineer working on the site and interviewed by AFP in mid-March, it would be “overcapacity by 40%” and all “emergency basins are filled”, which is “contrary to safety rules nuclear” international in the event of disaster. Wrongs that she attributes to the Ukrainian leadership of Chernobyl. Contacted by AFP, the Ukrainian atomic agency was unable to respond to these accusations.
The fires that broke out at the end of March in the area of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant also worried the Ukrainian authorities. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Sunday March 20 that the security situation in nuclear power plants remained unchanged. She had estimated the previous week that the forest fires around Chernobyl did not pose a major radiological risk.
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Can Russia cause another accident at Chernobyl?
Fighting and the use of explosives in the Chernobyl zone also remain a matter of concern and collateral damage can always be envisaged according to experts. The site was not equipped with a missile defense system. At a press conference in Paris on February 28, Alexandra Prysiazhniuk, spokesperson for the Ukrainian embassy in France, briefly recalled that Russian planes were still flying over the Chernobyl forbidden zone with a “risk of bombardment”. .
Russian bombings did indeed take place at the end of March, targeting in particular Ukrainian checkpoints in the town of Slavoutitch, where the families of the workers of the nuclear power plant reside. These attacks are at the origin of the forest fires in the exclusion zone which then revived concerns around Chernobyl.
Still, the Russian army would have installed “a military base” within the walls of Chernobyl, according to a relative of a technician retained on the site, who himself worked in this plant. “The strategy is brilliant from a war point of view (…) No one is going to fire a missile at Chernobyl” to target the Russian army, he told AFP in mid-March. “But in the name of humanity, this is absolutely insane.” While the main risk for Chernobyl is, according to him, “human error”, the current situation is a “catastrophe” for the plant, with Russian soldiers “unaware” of the nature of the site on which they are.
In The Parisian Friday, February 25, Teva Meyer, expert in energy issues, nevertheless estimated that “almost nothing is very radioactive” in Chernobyl, “except for the inside of the sarcophagus, which is protected and solid” and that it “It would really take a combination of significant circumstances for the strikes to hit him to the point of hurting him”.
Can Russia make a “dirty bomb” in Chernobyl?
The question of the manufacture by the Russians of a “dirty bomb” from the nuclear waste of Chernobyl was also raised, but very quickly dismissed by the experts. The manufacture of such a bomb cannot be improvised and “demands an industrial organization”. The Russian nuclear arsenal is moreover largely sufficient to save such a “tinkering” according to the same sources.
According to the American magazine, Forbes citing the Reuters news agency, Russia could nevertheless send a message to Westerners by seizing the Chernobyl zone. “A message to NATO so that it does not take any military action”, summarizes a Russian source.
Why did Russia take Chernobyl?
It appears that the rapid positioning of the military in the Chernobyl zone responds to a conventional military strategy. First, Chernobyl is located in the immediate vicinity of the Belarusian border, from which Russia has chosen to enter Ukraine. It is also located just north of kyiv, the capital, which quickly emerged as a military objective of Vladimir Putin. The area is also very close to the Dnieper River, a drinking water reserve for the Ukrainian capital, which could prove to be strategic.
The 1986 nuclear disaster and the construction of the sarcophagus further necessitated the construction of major infrastructure, such as a railroad that the Russians could use to transport military equipment and supplies for its troops in the conquest of kyiv. Electrical installations can also be diverted to cut off part of the capital’s energy supply.
Finally, some emphasize the symbolic aspect of the capture of Chernobyl. Forbes believes that “the nuclear site is of historic significance to Russia because Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the president of the Soviet Union at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, said the accident ‘may have been the true cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union’, even more so than its policy of restructuring the economic and political system”.