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A live stream of the Zaporizhzhia plant, verified by The Washington Post, showed a white blur of flames and smoke rising into the sky early Friday morning local time. The International Atomic Energy Agency had convened an emergency meeting Wednesday as fighting closed in on the site in Enerhodar and as experts said a strike could trigger disaster.
“It is extremely important that the nuclear power plants are not put at risk in any way,” said IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi earlier this week. He said that “an accident involving the nuclear facilities in Ukraine could have severe consequences for public health and the environment.”
A Ukrainian official told the Associated Press that elevated levels of radiation were already being detected near the Zaporizhzhia site. But the extent of the damage remained unclear. As news of the fire spread, the IAEA tweeted it is “aware of reports of shelling” at the plant and in contact with Ukrainian officials.
“Fire has already broke out,” Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted Friday, likening the potential consequences of an explosion to the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown. Ukraine said last week that Russian forces had taken control of the abandoned Chernobyl plant, and the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said at the time that such a disaster could “happen again in 2022” if war goes on.
Kuleba said that Russian forces had surrounded and fired on the Zaporizhzhia site, which has six reactors and provides Ukraine with a quarter of its power generation. “Russians must IMMEDIATELY cease the fire, allow firefighters, establish a security zone!” he said.
Ukrainian firefighters struggled to access the nuclear plant because of Russian shelling in the area, according to a senior Ukrainian government official. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke by phone about the fire with President Biden and European Union officials, a Ukrainian official said. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also spoke with Zelensky, his office said.
Jon B. Wolfsthal, a former adviser to then vice president Joe Biden, said on Twitter that the model reactor here was more safe and better protected than the Chernobyl reactors and that the reactors should go on emergency shutdown. “We don’t know the status of the system or the power and until we do, we won’t know the full extent of the risk,” he said, adding that “Russia bears the blame” for the crisis at the plant.
A key question about the safety of the nuclear plant is the location of the fire, said Gregory Jaczko, who served as the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission under President Barack Obama and does not have direct knowledge of the situation.
“If they breached the containment structure — the shield building that is there to protect things from getting to the reactor — that would be more problematic,” he said. If the fire got to an area with fuel, that could to lead to a “significant release” of radiation, he said.
Another pressing concern, he said, is the need to keep any of the radioactive spent fuel on the premises cool. Normally this material sits in pools where it is kept cool, and overheating could cause a release of radiation.
“This is a very precarious situation,” he said.
The attack came after a large crowd gathered Wednesday with Ukrainian flags, as well as barricades of cars, trucks, tires and sandbags, to block the road to Enerhodar, where the plant is located, from Russian troops.
More than a third of Ukraine’s working nuclear reactors are disconnected from the power grid, according to authorities, curbing a significant source of the nation’s electricity. Six out of 15 reactors were listed as disconnected on Thursday by the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine, up from two last week, before Russia launched its full-scale attack. The six offline include half of the reactors at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
Grossi, the IAEA head, said Wednesday at a news conference that two sites where radioactive materials are present had already been hit in the fighting.
On Sunday, Ukrainian authorities informed the agency that Russian missiles had struck the site of a radioactive waste disposal facility in the capital Kyiv. A day earlier, an electrical transformer at another waste disposal facility in the city of Kharkiv was similarly damaged.
In neither incident was any radioactive material released, Rossi said. But he expressed serious concerns.
“One of the unique features of this situation is that this is an ongoing military conflict taking place in a country with a vast nuclear program,” he told reporters in Vienna. .
“There is a lot of nuclear material present,” he said. “You could have a situation where you have low level waste, a release of radioactive material. What we have to ensure is that these things don’t happen.”
John Hudson, Liz Sly, Steven Mufson, Shane Harris and Maria Paul contributed to this report.
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