MELTDOWN
Europe’s biggest nuke plant’s warning systems go DOWN sparking fresh radiation fears after Russians shut down Chernobyl
WARNING systems at Europe's biggest nuclear power plant are down, sparking fresh radiation fears.
The UN’s nuclear watchdog the IAEA said it has lost touch with the Zaporizhzhia site, which comes as the Russians also took Chernobyl off grid.
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Russian forces stormed Zaporizhzhia, in southern Ukraine, in the early hours of March 4, with tanks blasting buildings and setting them on fire.
IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said the body is “concerned about the sudden interruption of such data flows to the IAEA’s Vienna headquarters from the two sites”.
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He said at both “large amounts of nuclear material are present in the form of spent or fresh nuclear fuel and other types of nuclear material”.
“These recent developments added to the IAEA’s growing concerns about the safety, security and safeguards impact of the conflict in Ukraine on the country’s nuclear facilities,” Grossi said.
"Such systems enable us to monitor nuclear material and activities at these sites when our inspectors are not present."
At the time of the Russian attack on Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine's foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba chillingly warned: "If it blows up, it will be 10 times larger than Chernobyl.”
Meanwhile Chernobyl has no power supply after Russian troops cut lines connecting it to the national grid on Wednesday.
Constant power is needed to cool spent fuel rods at the mothballed site of the world's worst nuclear disaster in 1986.
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Emergency generators are supplying back-up power but they will run out of diesel in 48 hours, officials said.
“After that, cooling systems of the storage facility for spent nuclear fuel will stop, making radiation leaks imminent,” Kuleba has warned.
The IAEA said it has been told by the Ukrainian nuclear regulator the situation for the staff at Chernobyl "was worsening".
Without electricity, experts fear the ventilation systems at the plant will also stop working - exposing staff to dangerous doses of radiation.
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Ukraine's state-owned energy company said military operations meant "there is no possibility to restore the lines" at Chernobyl and there was also no power to the site's security systems.
Earlier the company said that if the power outage causes a leak: "The radioactive cloud could be carried by wind to other regions of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and Europe."
The company said there are about 20,000 spent fuel assemblies which cannot be kept cool amid the power outage.
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The plant sits inside an exclusion zone that houses decommissioned reactors as well as radioactive waste facilities.
More than 2,000 staff still work at the plant as it requires constant management to prevent another nuclear disaster.
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