The United States should embrace a clear policy condemning military attacks on international nuclear power plants, a senior think tank official said at a hearing Monday.
Earlier this month the United States was one of only four countries that opposed a resolution for the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] Board of Governors that expressed concern about attacks targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, including nuclear attacks, James Acton, said Monday. His comments came during a hearing by the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant and its ownership in Ukraine.
Acton is co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at Washington think tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The resolution expressed concern about attacks targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, critical for the off-site power supply of nuclear power plants, Acton said. He added that while attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure “represent a direct threat to nuclear safety,” there were “only four countries that opposed this resolution on the Board of Governors: Russia, China, Niger and the United States.”
Although the resolution still passed, the U.S. gave an opposing vote and said in a statement that while it supports the IAEA’s work in Ukraine, “we do not support the Board’s current consideration of an unnecessary resolution that does not help achieve peace between Ukraine and Russia,” Acton said.
“So it may seem like an easy thing to say we shouldn’t attack other countries’ nuclear power plants. We should have a very clear policy … But in fact, we’re kind of moving in the opposite direction,” Acton said.
Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Russian forces captured the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest nuclear plant in Europe and a producer of 20% of Ukraine’s electricity at one point. Acton not only called this move “unprecedented,” but said it was “uniquely awful” in that “there has never been an operation mounted against an operating nuclear power plant before.”
“The attacks last year against the Iranian facilities at Fordow and Natanz had no, to my knowledge, detectable off site radioactivity,” Acton said. “There are very, very different effects from attacking operating nuclear power plants and for attacking other kinds of nuclear facilities. But I do think that attacks against other kinds of nuclear facilities weaken the normative barrier against attacks against any kind of nuclear facilities,” he added. “It seems to me, it sends out a general message that nuclear installations can be legitimately targeted in times of war.”
IAEA director general Rafael Grossi met in Moscow this week with a Russian delegation met by the director general of Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear energy corporation that has taken control of Zaporizhzhia since 2022. Grossi and the delegation discussed Zaporizhzhia, and plans to restart the station’s power units, though Grossi and the Rosatom director said electricity generation at the plant would only resume when the military conflict ends.