When work began on what would become Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in 1981, southern Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and political instability was hardly a risk. Today Ukraine is at war with Moscow, the factory is occupied by Russian troops and experts say they are concerned about its safety.
Three problems at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, in the city of Enerhodar and close to the territory of Ukraine, have raised particular concern.
Ukrainian officials say Russian forces have installed artillery at the plant to defend against a possible counter-attack by Ukrainian forces seeking to recapture territory lost since Russia invaded the country in February. In March, a fire broke out during a Russian attack on the factory, and Russia later took control.
The exiled mayor of Enerhodar, Dmytro Orlov, has described a series of episodes in recent weeks in which he alleged that some of the factory’s 11,000 workers were forced to work by Russian troops. Some have been arrested and questioned as Russia searches for possible saboteurs, he said. Earlier this month, Mr. Orlov that a diver at the factory had died after being tortured by Russian soldiers.
Mr Orlov’s statements could not be independently confirmed. But officials from Energoatom, the state-owned company that oversees the complex, have made similar statements based on interviews with workers at the factory, and witnesses in other occupied parts of Ukraine have relayed similar reports of mass detentions of civilians.
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The director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, last week expressed “deep concern about the extremely difficult situation for Ukrainian workers at the factory.”
On Monday, as a new sign of how politicized the factory has become, Ukrainian authorities said a Russian film crew shot a video at the factory intended to show how Russian forces had improved security there.
But the most immediate problem, experts say, is transparency. Nuclear power plants routinely transmit safety data to the IAEA in Vienna. Twice in the past few weeks, Zaporizhzhia’s data has gone offline. The agency said in a statement last week that data transmissions had been restored after a week-long hiatus.
The deployments and regular visits of service personnel are considered fundamental to the safety architecture of all nuclear power plants. But the agency said its experts had not been to the Zaporizhzhya factory since the start of the war. Ukraine’s other three operational nuclear power plants remain in government hands. Russian forces briefly took control of the defunct Chernobyl facility — which in 1986 was the site of the worst nuclear accident in history — but withdrew in March.
“There is reason to be concerned” about Zaporizhzhya, said Ulrich Kühn, head of the arms control and emerging technologies program at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg.
He described the situation as “bleak”, especially given the lack of consistent oversight, arguing that political stability, a precondition for civilian nuclear security, was now absent in Zaporizhzhya.
“A big risk is that the workers are under maximum psychological stress,” he said. “What if they make a mistake?”
Mr Kühn said the international community should continue to express its concern about the instability at the factory, but in order to prevent the issue from becoming part of the deadlock over the war, countries considered neutral towards Ukraine, such as Pakistan, can play a greater role in speaking out.