Unlike Chernobyl, those plants are not isolated, and the invasion could create safety issues such as preventing workers from traveling to reactors to allow them to operate safely or causing power outages that affect the ability to cool reactors. Similarly, Acton at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote that the bigger nuclear risk involves potential fighting around Ukraineâs four active plants. The steel containment structure, the length of nearly three football fields, was needed to control leaking radioactivity, she said: âThe last thing you want is a missile hitting that.â âItâs called an exclusion zone for a reason,â Brown said. Yet Kate Brown, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who has written about the Chernobyl accident, said she fears that fighting at the reactor site could start fires that could carry smoke-borne radioactivity. âYes, itâs highly contaminated, and yes, it should be contained,â he continued, âbut thereâs no active energy there that can cause an explosion or cause a plume of any biological significance.â âFrom a biological, nuclear safety point of view, this is a fairly benign site at this point,â said Lake Barrett, who served as acting deputy director of the Department of Energyâs Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management from 1993 to 2002. This unlawful and dangerous hostage-taking, which could upend the routine civil service efforts required to maintain and protect the nuclear waste facilities, is obviously incredibly alarming.â White House press secretary Jen Psaki said yesterday, âWe are outraged by credible reports that Russian soldiers are currently holding the staff of the Chernobyl facilities hostage. However, Alyona Shevtsova, adviser to the commander of Ukraineâs Ground Forces, said on Facebook that staff are being âheld hostage,â CNN reported this morning. So there was no one to give instructions or defend,â she said. A spokesperson for the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management, Yevgeniya KuznetsovĐ°, told CNN, âWhen I came to the office today in the morning, it turned out that the management had left.
Normally, the site would be full of workers and engineers continuing the decommissioning of the devastated reactors. According to the Associated Press, Zelenskyy said on Twitter that âour defenders are giving their lives so that the tragedy of 1986 will not be repeated.â He added that âthis is a declaration of war against the whole of Europe.â Chernobyl is enclosed by a massive, $1.9 billion steel structure to contain still-dangerous levels of fuel and radioactive debris.Äźarly in yesterdayâs Russian assault, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that Russian forces were trying to seize the Chernobyl facility and raised the specter of a dangerous new release. In 1986, an explosion at one of Chernobylâs reactors spewed radioactive clouds far into Western Europe.ÄȘfter the invasion, Ukraine officials informed the IAEA that there had been no casualties nor destruction at the plant, the IAEA said in a statement from its Vienna headquarters. Grossiâs concerns were expressed after Russian soldiers seized the Chernobyl plant after what officials called a fierce battle with Ukrainian forces in the protected area surrounding the site near the city of Pripyat.
