Ukraine: IAEA expresses concern for Nuclear Facility Safety

Vienna, 3 March 2022 (TDI): The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General, Rafael Mariano Grossi expressed his concern about the controversy in Ukraine, as well as any military or other action that could jeopardize the safety or security of Ukraine’s four operational nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities, including the Chornobyl disaster site from 1986.

Grossi urged the 35-member IAEA Board of Governors today that “the safety and security of nuclear facilities, as well as nuclear and other radioactive material, in Ukraine, must under no circumstances be compromised.”

“Though we may use descriptors like ‘normal operations’ in a technical context, I want to illustrate that the circumstances under which the professionals at Ukraine’s four nuclear power plants are managing to keep the reactors that produce half of the country’s electricity running are anything but normal,” he said.

After a violent fight with the Ukrainian battalion defending the site, where radioactive radiation from the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe in 1986 is still escaping, Russian soldiers seized control of the decommissioned Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) on Thursday.

The disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Facility in 1986 was the world’s greatest nuclear tragedy. As per reports, more than 30 casualties in the repercussion of an explosion that ripped through Chernobyl’s No. 4 reactor in Pripyat, Ukraine, on April 26, 1986.

IAEA has used the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine (SNRIU) as a pivotal source of facts for the world community. According to SNRIU, Russian soldiers demolished an electrical transformer at a low-level radioactive dumpsite near Kharkiv in the North-East, but no radioactive material was released.

Grossi added that the competence to give “accurate and full data on the safety and security of all nuclear plants in Ukraine” should not be “interrupted, hampered, or affected.”

The IAEA’s distinctive mandate makes it the only independent international technical organization that provides frequent updates on Ukraine’s nuclear plants’ safety and security. This feature of the IAEA’s work is critical at a time when there is so much uncertainty.