Zaporizhzhia: Fire cuts off occupied Ukrainian nuclear plant from power grid

Europe's biggest nuclear plant was disconnected from the national grid for the first time in its history because of fire damage. ITV News' Ian Woods reports.

Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has been cut off from the electrical grid for the first time after fires damaged the only working transmission line, according to Ukraine's nuclear operator.

The plant will have to rely on emergency diesel operators to run cooling systems that are essential for the safe operation of the reactors.

It is not yet clear if the plant had been reconnected.

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe's largest, has been occupied by Russian forces since the early days of the war, and continued fighting near the facility has heightened fears of a catastrophe that could affect nearby towns in southern Ukraine — or potentially an even wider region.

Ukraine cannot simply shut down its nuclear plants during the war because it is heavily reliant on them, and its 15 reactors at four stations provide about half of its electricity.

External power from the diesel operators is essential not just to cool the two reactors still in operation but also the spent radioactive fuel stored in special facilities onsite — and only one of the plant's four power lines connecting it to the grid has been operational.

The cutoff underscored concerns about the plant, which the government in Kyiv alleges Russia is essentially holding hostage, storing weapons there and launching attacks from around it.

Moscow, meanwhile, accuses Ukraine of recklessly firing on the facility, which is located in the city of Enerhodar.

Still, an ongoing conflict near a working atomic plant is troubling for many experts who fear that a damaged facility could lead to a disaster.

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“Anybody who understands nuclear safety issues has been trembling for the last six months,” Mycle Schneider, an independent policy consultant and coordinator of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report, said before the latest incident at the plant.

Fighting in early March caused a brief fire at the plant’s training complex that officials said did not result in the release of any radiation. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russia’s military actions there amount to “nuclear blackmail.”

No civilian nuclear plant is designed for a wartime situation, although the buildings housing Zaporizhzhia’s six reactors are protected by reinforced concrete that could withstand an errant shell, experts say.

The more immediate concern is that a disruption of electricity supply — like the one nuclear power operator, Energoatom, reported on Thursday that meant two remaining reactors at the plant were disconnected from the grid.

The operator said it couldn’t immediately comment on the operation of safety systems at the plant, where emergency diesel generators are sometimes unreliable.

Another concern about the fighting nearby is that pools where spent fuel rods are kept to be cooled also are vulnerable to shelling, which could cause the release of radioactive material.

Kyiv told the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, that shelling earlier this week damaged transformers at a nearby conventional power plant, disrupting electricity supplies to the Zaporizhzhia plant for several hours.

If an incident at the Zaporizhzhia plant were to release significant amounts of radiation, the scale and location of the contamination would be determined largely by the weather, said Paul Dorfman, a nuclear safety expert at the University of Sussex who has advised the British and Irish governments.

The April 26, 1986, explosion and fire at one of four reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear plant north of Kyiv sent a cloud of radioactive material across a wide swath of Europe and beyond. In addition to fuelling anti-nuclear sentiment in many countries, the disaster left deep psychological scars on Ukrainians.

"If something really went wrong, then we have a full-scale radiological catastrophe that could reach Europe, go as far as the Middle East, and certainly could reach Russia, but the most significant contamination would be in the immediate area,” Dorfman said.