The comments from UN nuclear agency chief Rafael Grossi follow fresh attacks near the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeast Ukraine.
The head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog has described the situation at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant as “very fragile,” and has vowed to expand the agency’s inspections to include critical electricity supplies.
Rafael Grossi, who is due to visit the site on Wednesday, was speaking at a press conference in Kyiv on Tuesday after meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukrainian nuclear and energy officials.
The visit is his 10th to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
“I think the situation – I have very often characterized it – as very fragile,” Grossi said. “The station is again on the verge of being on a blackout. We’ve had eight of those in the past. A blackout (means) no power: no power, no cooling. No cooling, then maybe you have a disaster.”
Earlier, Grossi posted on X that he was on his way to Zaporizhzhia to “help prevent a nuclear accident.”
The Zaporizhzhia plant, which came under Russian control in the wake of its full-scale invasion, saw artillery shelling in the area on Monday that damaged the facility’s power access, according to its operator Energoatom, which blamed Russia for the attacks.
“Russian shelling damaged one of the two external overhead lines through which … the Zaporizhzhya NPP receives power from the Ukrainian power system,” the operator said in a post on Telegram. “In the event of damage to the second line, an emergency situation will arise,” the Ukrainian agency said, adding that technicians couldn’t access the site of the damage because of the “real threat of repeated shelling.”
Analysts say an explosion at the Zaporizhzhia plant would produce radiation and likely trigger panic, but the radiation risk beyond the immediate blast area would be relatively low and nothing like the scale of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster. Also, if the wind is in an easterly direction, radiation could be pushed toward Russia.
The Zaporizhzhia region is one of four — along with Donetsk, Kherson and Luhansk — in southern and eastern Ukraine that Russia partly, and illegally, annexed in September 2022, seven months after it invaded its neighbour.
Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief responded to criticism he received for a visit to Russia’s Kursk power plant: “This is a very serious international crisis and people expect the IAEA to take sides and to criticise A or B”.
“For us to be relevant, to be useful in this situation, we have to keep engaging, we have to keep our work technical and objective,” said Grossi.
The Vienna-based IAEA says ongoing attacks in the Zaporizhzhia area, as well as damage to Ukraine’s grid, pose threats to the power supply that’s vital to the country’s nuclear power stations.
Grossi, who is travelling with a team of IAEA experts and officials, began a round of meetings in Kyiv with a stop at the Ministry of Energy and talks with the minister, Herman Halushchenko.
Grossi said he had accepted a Ukrainian request to expand inspections to include electricity substations providing power to Ukraine’s nuclear power plants:
“This is a new dimension, an important dimension I hope, of our support here, which we discussed and agreed with President Zelenskyy just now.”
