Russia’s plans for Zaporizhzhia plant spark nuclear safety fears

A blueprint for disconnecting Europe’s largest nuclear plant from Ukraine’s power grid has been drawn up by Russian engineers, according to a Ukrainian official.

Petro Kotin, head of Ukraine’s atomic energy company, told The Guardian that Moscow was planning to connect the Zaporizhzhia plant to the Russian power network if fighting severed remaining power connections.

During the potential switch-over, the plant in southeastern Ukraine would be reliant “only on a back-up diesel-powered generator, with no further options should that fail”, said the paper. The potential consequences are extreme, according to Kotin. He explained that “if you fail to provide cooling… for one hour and a half, then you will have melting already”.

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Kotin told The Guardian that he fears the Russians are now targeting the power connections between Zaporizhzhia and Ukraine’s grid to make the emergency situation “a reality”. “They just started doing that, they starting all the shelling, just to take out these lines,” he said.

The plant has been under the control of Russian forces since March, but is being run by Ukrainian workers. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that two Zaporizhzhia employees had been arrested for passing information to Ukrainian authorities.

Serving and recently escaped workers at the plant told The Telegraph that Russian security forces have been torturing personnel “to prevent them from telling UN inspectors about safety risks”.

The plant’s position close to the frontline, the treatment of its workers and its current condition – with vehicles packed “so tightly into turbine halls that firefighters would struggle to access them if a fire broke out”, said The Guardian – are all contributing to increasing fears of a Chernobyl-style nuclear fallout.

On Tuesday, UN political affairs chief Rosemary DiCarlo told the Security Council that an agreement is “urgently needed” to re-establish the plant as a “purely civilian infrastructure” to prevent a “potentially ‘catastrophic’ disaster”.