: Inside the Urgent Race to Secure Ukraine’s Nuclear Plants #WorldNEWS Rafael Mariano Grossi was awakened in the predawn hours Friday with an urgent crisis. A massive blaze was engulfing a building

Inside the Urgent Race to Secure Ukraine’s Nuclear Plants #WorldNEWS
Rafael 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 (IAEA) to find out what was happening.
Grossi was patched through to the IAEA’s 24-hour Center for Incidents and Emergencies for the latest. The agency, which reports to the United Nations, was in-touch with workers at the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant in southeastern Ukraine. Radiation levels were normal. Grossi relayed the information to Ukrainian and Russian politicians, whom he called soon after, urging them to halt the hostilities.
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But in those conversations, he discovered that what was happening at Zaporizhzhya was no accident. A Russian government official told Grossi that the military was seizing the power plant to “prevent acts of sabotage” or terrorism. Ukraine, for its part, fears that the attack is an opening salvo in Russia’s goal to control their power grid. The Zaporizhzhya plant can generate enough energy to illuminate 4 million homes and accounts for one-fifth of the average annual electricity production in Ukraine.
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 plants 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. ”
With four plants that contain 15 reactors, Ukraine relies heavily on nuclear power for its electricity. To minimize the risk of a nuclear catastrophe amid the continuing fighting, Grossi is pressing the Ukrainian and Russian governments to begin diplomatic talks in Ukraine to make sure the battle for Zaporizhzhya is not repeated elsewhere around the country. “I hope and pray that these negotiations are successful,” he said. “We need to ensure the physical integrity of all the facilities in the country. ”
Nuclear power plants, self-evidently, are not designed to be in active war zones. A misplaced artillery shell or free-falling bomb at any of these facilities holds the potential to create a humanitarian disaster that could spread well beyond Ukraine’s borders.