There remains a “very real potential for a major nuclear accident at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant after two years of almost non-stop combat near the facility, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi told the United Nations Security Council on Thursday.
Addressing the council for the sixth time since the war began in February 2022, Grossi said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would stay focused on helping to prevent a potentially catastrophic nuclear accident at Europe’s largest nuclear plant.
“A nuclear accident has not yet happened,” Grossi said in Jan. 26 statement. “This is true. But complacency could still lead us to tragedy. That should not happen. We must do everything in our power to minimize the risk that it does.”
Grossi briefed the 15-member Security Council on the work of IAEA personnel, which rotate in teams across the frontlines to maintain a constant presence at the site. Grossi will himself cross the frontline to travel to the plant “within the next two weeks, enabling him to assess the situation there first-hand some eight months after his previous mission to the plant,” he said.
He was last at the site in June, following the destruction of the downstream Kakhovka dam, which supplied water for reactor cooling and other essential nuclear safety and security functions at the plant.
In his address to the Security Council at U.N. Headquarters in New York, Grossi laid out potential threats to nuclear safety and security at the site.
“Although the plant has not been shelled for a considerable time, significant military activities continue in the region and sometimes in the vicinity of the facility, with our staff reporting rockets flying overhead close to the plant, thereby putting at risk the physical integrity of the plant,” he said.
Another potential Achilles heel for operations at the plant is its off-site power supply, which remains “highly precarious”, Grossi said. It is currently relying on just two external power lines, of 10 it had before the conflict.
“There have now been eight occasions when the site lost all off-site power and had to rely on emergency diesel generators, the last line of defense against a nuclear accident, to provide essential cooling of the reactor and spent fuel,” Grossi said.
