Nuclear War Alarm: Russian troops occupy Ukraine nuclear power plant

The Russian military occupied Ukraine’s largest nuclear power plant after a middle-of-the-night attack including a brief fire outbreak in the facility on Friday (March 4). The Zaporizhzhya Nuclear power plant is the biggest nuclear power plant in the country and in all of Europe, producing 25% of the country’s power source. Ukraine’s State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate (SNRIU) issued a statement of the fire being extinguished and no trace of radiation was released. The agency confirmed the power plant is under Russian control but the officials were able to be indirectly informed of the situation at the station including the management operating at a “gunpoint.” Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that a Russian projectile had hit a training center causing the brief fire, but none of the six reactors were affected and radiation monitoring systems continue to be fully functional. Grossi warned that the ongoing military operation around the site is “a situation that is very difficult to sustain, very fragile.” The attack triggered a global alarm of a catastrophe that might rival the world’s worst nuclear disaster at Ukraine’s Chernobyl in 1986 but experts quickly stressed the fundamental differences between Chernobyl and the Zaporizhzhya plant including the latter being designed to be safer and modernized. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN noted that the world “narrowly averted a nuclear catastrophe last night.” The US Embassy in Kyiv said that “it is a war crime to attack a nuclear power plant.” The Russian government, on the other hand, claimed in a video briefing that the Ukrainian forces had attempted a “monstrous provocation” that led to a firefight around the nuclear power plant. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov insisted that a Ukrainian “sabotage group” had set the fire at the nuclear power plant themselves without producing any supporting evidence. KSO/Expat Media
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