Russians take Ukraine nuclear plant; no radiation after fire

KYIV (AP):

Russian troops Friday seized the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe after a middle-of-the-night attack that set it on fire and briefly raised worldwide fears of a catastrophe in the most chilling turn yet in Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Firefighters put out the blaze, and no radiation was released, UN and Ukrainian officials said, as Russian forces pressed on with their week-old offensive on multiple fronts and the number of refugees fleeing the country eclipsed 1.2 million.

While the vast Russian armoured column threatening Kyiv remained stalled outside the capital, President Vladimir Putin’s military has launched hundreds of missiles and artillery attacks on cities and other sites around the country, and made significant gains on the ground in the south, in an apparent bid to cut off Ukraine’s access to the sea.

In the attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in the southeastern city of Enerhodar, the chief of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said a Russian “projectile” hit a training centre, not any of the six reactors.

The attack triggered global alarm and fear of a catastrophe that could dwarf the world’s worst nuclear disaster, at Ukraine’s Chernobyl in 1986. In an emotional night-time speech, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he feared an explosion that would be “the end for everyone. The end for Europe. The evacuation of Europe”.

But nuclear officials from Sweden to China said no radiation spikes had been reported, as did Grossi.

Authorities said that Russian troops had taken control of the overall site but that the plant staff continued to run it. Only one reactor was operating, running at 60 per cent capacity, Grossi said in the aftermath of the attack.

Two people were injured in the fire, Grossi said. Ukraine’s state nuclear plant operator Energoatom said three Ukrainian soldiers were killed and two wounded.

ACCIDENTAL DAMAGE TO NUCLEAR REACTORS

The crisis at Zaporizhzhia unfolded after Grossi, earlier in the week, expressed grave concern that the fighting could cause accidental damage to Ukraine’s 15 nuclear reactors at four plants around the country.

Nuclear safety expert Edwin Lyman, of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, said the presence of reactors in the war zone adds a new and highly dangerous dimension to the crisis in Ukraine.

“These plants are now in a situation that few people ever seriously contemplated when they were originally built, and that is the potential that they would be in the middle of a war zone,” he said. “No nuclear plant has been designed to withstand a potential threat of a full-scale military attack, and the plants in Ukraine are no exception.”