{"id":478239,"date":"2025-10-06T14:04:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T14:04:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/478239\/"},"modified":"2025-10-06T14:04:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T14:04:15","slug":"is-russias-putin-gambling-with-the-safety-of-ukraines-nuclear-stations-russia-ukraine-war-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/478239\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Russia\u2019s Putin gambling with the safety of Ukraine\u2019s nuclear stations? | Russia-Ukraine war News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kyiv, Ukraine \u2013<\/strong> On October 2, Russian President Vladimir Putin alleged that Ukrainian attacks<\/a> had destroyed a high-voltage transmission line between the Moscow-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant<\/a> in southeastern Ukraine and Kyiv-controlled areas.<\/p>\n

Days earlier, Ukraine\u2019s leader, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said<\/a> Russian shelling had cut the plant off from the electricity network.<\/p>\n

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The mammoth, six-reactor plant \u2013 Europe\u2019s largest and known in Ukraine as the ZAES \u2013 sits less than 10km (6.2 miles) south of the front line. It has been shut since 2022, generating none of the electricity that once provided up to a fifth of Ukraine\u2019s needs.<\/p>\n

But dozens of Moscow-deployed engineers have frantically tried to restart it \u2013 so far unsuccessfully. Ukraine has long feared<\/a> that Russia is trying to connect the power grid and quench a thirst for energy in Crimea and other occupied areas.<\/p>\n

Putin purported that the alleged Ukrainian strikes caused a blackout at the plant and that it had to be fuelled by diesel generators.<\/p>\n

The latest blackout at the plant is the longest wartime outage of power.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the [Ukrainian] side, people should understand that if they play so dangerously, they have an operating nuclear power station on their side,\u201d Putin told a forum in St Petersburg.<\/p>\n

\u2018The radioactivity is so powerful\u2019<\/p>\n

In fact, apart from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Ukraine has three operating power stations \u2013 as well as the shutdown Chornobyl facility, the site of one of the world\u2019s worst nuclear disasters.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd what prevents us from mirroring [Ukraine\u2019s alleged actions] in response? Let them think about it,\u201d Putin said.<\/p>\n

His threat had apparently already been fulfilled a day earlier. Ukraine accused Russia of shelling that damaged the power supply to the colossal protective \u201csarcophagus\u201d over the Chornobyl station\u2019s Reactor Four that exploded in 1986.<\/p>\n

\"AIn 2006, a French group of musicians performed in front of the shut-down fourth reactor of the Chornobyl nuclear power station. The Number Four nuclear reactor blew up in 1986. The reactor, in what was then the Soviet republic of Ukraine, spewed a huge cloud of radioactive dust over much of Europe in what was the worst nuclear accident the world has ever seen [File: Reuters]<\/p>\n

Both the Chornobyl station and the plant in Zaporizhzhia need electricity for their safety systems and, most importantly, for the uninterrupted circulation of water that cools nuclear fuel.<\/p>\n

The fuel, thousands of uranium rods that keep emitting heat, are too radioactive to be taken anywhere else.<\/p>\n

In Chornobyl, the fuel is spent and submerged in cooling ponds or \u201cdry-stored\u201d in ventilated, secured facilities.<\/p>\n

But at the Zaporizhzhia site, the rods are still inside the reactors \u2013 and are newer, hotter, and made in the United States.<\/p>\n

Before the war, Ukraine began a switch from the hexagonal, bee-cell-like rods made by Rosatom, Russia\u2019s nuclear monopoly, to the square rods made by Westinghouse, an energy giant based in Pittsburgh in the US.<\/p>\n

The US-made rods will take years to cool down enough to be removed without the risk of contamination, according to a former Zaporizhzhia plant engineer who fled to Kyiv.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe radioactivity is so powerful that one can\u2019t get the fuel out, [or] transport or handle in other ways until it burns out. It will take years,\u201d the engineer told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity because of security concerns for relatives in Enerhodar.<\/p>\n

Ukrainian forces \u2018prevent\u2019 Russia\u2019s alleged plans<\/p>\n

A greater challenge at the plant is a severe lack of reactor-cooling water. The Zaporizhzhia station stood less than 15km (9 miles) upstream from the mammoth, Soviet-designed Novo-Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River.<\/p>\n

The dam created a reservoir with up to 18 cubic kilometres (4.76 trillion gallons) of water that freely flowed to the power station. In June 2023, the dam was destroyed by powerful blasts \u2013 Ukraine and Russian traded blame<\/a> \u2013 and the water level dropped dramatically.<\/p>\n

The deep cooling ponds around the plant that never froze, even in the harshest winters, had been filled to the brim, but the water keeps evaporating. There is enough to cool the shutdown reactors \u2013 but not nearly enough if the station is restarted and the uranium rods turn the water into steam to power the turbines.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s absolutely impossible to switch on even one bloc,\u201d the engineer said. \u201cOf course, the Russians keep digging and supply some water, but it\u2019s not enough at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

The biggest problem is Russia\u2019s failure to hook the plant to the energy grid of occupied regions as Ukrainian forces pin-pointedly destroy the transmission lines Russia is building \u2013 along with fuel depots and thermal power stations, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Russians are restoring them any way they can, but Ukrainian forces very much prevent the restoration,\u201d the engineer quipped.<\/p>\n

Bellona, a Norway-based nuclear monitor, said on October 2 that a \u201cgreater danger lies in Moscow\u2019s potential use of the crisis to justify reconnecting the plant to its own grid \u2013 portraying itself as the saviour preventing a nuclear disaster\u201d.<\/p>\n

Should Moscow do that, the step would only \u201cworsen [the] strategic situation, give Moscow additional leverage, and bring a potential restart closer \u2013 a move that, amid ongoing fighting, would itself sharply increase the risk of a nuclear accident,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n

\"FILEA Russian service member stands guard at a checkpoint near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in the Zaporizhia region of Russian-controlled Ukraine, June 15, 2023 [Alexander Ermochenko\/Reuters]<\/p>\n

Analysts pointed to a deal proposed by US President Donald Trump<\/a> in March to transfer the plant to US management as a possible solution.<\/p>\n

Ukrainian strikes \u201cwill go on until Russia makes a peace deal that also includes US control over the ZAES and its operation\u201d, Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany\u2019s University of Bremen, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in recent weeks, blackouts in Crimea have become unpredictable and distressing, a Crimea local told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey switch the power off and switch it back on without any warning. Then again \u2013 on and off, on and off. My fridge died,\u201d said a resident of Simferopol, Crimea\u2019s administrative capital, on condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety.<\/p>\n

Russia understands that improved power supply is a prerequisite for its efforts to restore occupied Ukrainian regions and conquer more Ukrainian land, said an observer.<\/p>\n

Moscow needs the plant to \u201ccover the growing [energy] consumption in the region, considering not just occupied Crimea, but also the occupied areas [above the Sea of] Azov. And also within the context of Russia\u2019s plan to occupy part of the Zaporizhia region,\u201d Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

Greenpeace said that its detailed analysis of high-resolution satellite images taken after what Putin alleged were Ukrainian strikes showed that he was bluffing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no evidence of any military strikes in the area surrounding the pylons and network of power lines in this part of Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant,\u201d the international environmentalist group said on October 1.<\/p>\n

The images showed that the power towers remained in position and there were no craters left by explosions around the lines, it said.<\/p>\n

Greenpeace concluded that the blackout at the plant is \u201ca deliberate act of sabotage by Russia\u201d whose aim is to \u201cpermanently disconnect the plant from the Ukraine grid and connect the nuclear plant to the grid occupied by Russia\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kyiv, Ukraine \u2013 On October 2, Russian President Vladimir Putin alleged that Ukrainian attacks had destroyed a high-voltage…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":478240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7655],"tags":[299,12,12617,332,7661,657],"class_list":{"0":"post-478239","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-russia","8":"tag-europe","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-nuclear-energy","11":"tag-russia","12":"tag-russia-ukraine-war","13":"tag-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115327603603124730","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/478240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}