Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned of a “critical” situation at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in southeastern Ukraine as the facility entered its seventh day operating without external power on Tuesday.
In his nightly address to Ukrainians, Zelensky said that Russian shelling of a key power line last Tuesday had left the plant “cut off from power, disconnected from the electrical grid [and] supplied with electricity by diesel generators” to cool its reactors for the past week.
“This is extraordinary. The generators and the plant were not designed for this, and have never operated in this mode for so long. And we already have information that one generator has failed”, Zelensky said, adding that continued Russian attacks were hampering efforts to repair power lines to reconnect the facility to Ukraine’s power grid and prevent its cooling systems from failing.
While the six-reactor plant, which was seized by Russia in March 2022 and has not produced electricity since September of that year, has been disconnected from Ukraine’s main power grid 10 times over the three and a half years of war, Zelensky stressed that this week’s external power outage was the longest to date and something that had “never happened before”.
“This is a threat to absolutely everyone. No terrorist in the world has ever dared to do to a nuclear plant what Russia is doing right now”, Zelensky said, adding that he had raised the issue during a call with UN Secretary General António Guterres on Tuesday.
In a statement, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Rafael Mariano Grossi said the agency was in “constant contact” with Moscow and Kyiv “with the aim to enable the plant’s swift re-connection to the electricity grid”.
“While the plant is currently coping thanks to its emergency diesel generators — the last line of defence — and there is no immediate danger as long as they keep working, it is clearly not a sustainable situation in terms of nuclear safety”, Grossi said.
The plant’s Russian-installed communications director, Yevgenia Yashina, insisted that the power line had been damaged by Ukrainian rather than Russian shelling and rejected Zelensky’s claim that one of the back-up generators had failed.
“All diesel generators are functioning normally. The situation is fully under control, and staff are monitoring all safety parameters”, Yashina told Russian state news agency TASS on Tuesday evening.