The International Atomic Energy Agency on Thursday announced a new deployment of staff to assess the safety of facilities at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, while warning of military activity “very close” to the Zaporizhya plant in the east of the country.
“The agency deployed additional personnel to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine this week to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the safety of the New Secure Confinement (NSC), which was damaged following the drone attack last February,” the agency announced in a statement, referring to the protective sarcophagus built around the plant’s reactor that was the target of the 1986 nuclear disaster.
Thus the entity reported that “although the February drone attack did not cause any release of radioactive material, it did cause significant structural damage, affecting the designed containment function of the National Security Center and its expected useful life.”
Meanwhile, the agency noted that its employees at the Zaporizhzhya plant “reported hearing military activity on a daily basis, often very close to the plant.” “On some days, the team reported hearing explosions and gunshots about 20 times, sometimes more,” he warned.
In contrast, he noted that at Ukraine’s three operating nuclear power plants, those in Khmelnytskyi, Rivne and southern Ukraine, “electricity production has largely returned to normal following last week’s military attacks on the electrical grid,” with almost all units operating at “full capacity.”
However, the International Atomic Energy Agency has denounced the “continued attacks on the Ukrainian electricity grid,” a situation in which it will send a team to assess damage to “several critical substations.”