Fearing an international environmental catastrophe, the IAEA is pressing Russia and Ukraine to halt in fighting near Ukraine's 15 reactors and other nuclear site.
afael Mariano Grossi was awakened in the predawn hours Friday with an urgent crisis. A massive blaze was engulfing a building at the site of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant as Russian and Ukrainian forces fought nearby. Word had already spread around the globe, fueling fears that the reactor on the site might be damaged and spew radiation across Eastern Europe. It fell to Grossi, as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency to find out what was happening.
When the clash ended and the fire was extinguished, the Russian military emerged in control. The facility had been damaged by a “projectile,” Grossi said, but the plant’s critical equipment remained intact. There was no radioactive leak, nor a risk for meltdown. Yet the situation was anything but reassuring. “This is unprecedented,” Grossi tells TIME. “We’ve never had armed conflict, in this way, with boots on the ground in a country with this configuration of nuclear infrastructure.
On Sunday, Russian missiles hit one of those disposal facilities in Kyiv. The day before, an electrical transformer was damaged at another disposal facility near Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv. Fortunately, there hasn’t been any radioactive release, Grossi said, but all these incidents highlight the risk for human health and the environment. “What we saw last night is something that could occur again,” he said.
While the plant was burning, U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky about the safety of the facility. The Russian military incursion drew“We survived a night that could have stopped the story, the history of Ukraine, the history of Europe,” Zelensky said. “Russian tank commanders knew what they were firing at… The terrorist state now resorted to nuclear terror.
Indeed. When the nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded near the Ukrainian city of Pripyat, the fire burned for 10 days. Radioactivity was detected in Europe as far as Ireland and Greece. A 20-mile exclusion zone has remained in-place even as Russia sent in columns of military forces and equipment to take over the decommissioned power plant in the opening days of the invasion last week.
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