The bombing of the Ukrainian nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia sparks fear and outrage
President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of "nuclear blackmail" as the two sides traded blame.
KYIV, Ukraine - At the start of the war in Ukraine, Russian troops took control of Europe's largest nuclear power plant after a fierce battle that included shrapnel hitting the structure of containment of Reactor No. 1. The resulting fire was quickly extinguished, a thick wall prevented a breach, and within five months the war, and world attention, shifted to new fronts, new outrages and new horrors.
The war had no shortage of devastation and global consequence - shifting geopolitical alliances, hunger in Africa exacerbated by missing grain exports, massacres of Ukrainian civilians, mass migrations and huge losses s of Ukrainian and Russian troops. Yet the repeated bombing of the sprawling Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in recent days has particularly sparked widespread fear and outrage at the sheer folly and existential danger of turning Europe's largest nuclear power plant into a theater of war. p>
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, addressing a nation late Thursday evening that still bears the scars of the nuclear disaster of the 1986 Chernobyl facility collapse, said the Kremlin was engaging in "undisguised nuclear blackmail" and called the situation at the plant "one of the greatest crimes of the terrorist state".
Neither side has an interest in a collapse which, in the worst case scenario, could result in widespread releases of deadly radioactive material, contaminating a territory spanning hundreds of thousands of miles, regardless of q ue is the direction in which the wind blew.
"The degree of infection of other territories of Ukraine Europe, Russia and Belarus depend from the direction of the wind,” said the State Agency for the Management of Exclusion Zones of Ukraine, which oversees the wastelands that still surround Chernobyl.
The plant's reactors are designed to withstand a range of hazards, from plane crashes to natural disasters. But direct rocket and missile fire may be another matter. Ukraine has so far resisted return fire from the plant with advanced US-supplied rocket systems for fear of hitting any of the six pressurized water reactors or stored highly radioactive waste .
But experts have expressed even more concern about the damage caused by fires if a shell were to hit a power transformer at the same time of the reactors. It could take the power grid offline, potentially causing the plant's cooling system to fail and leading to a catastrophic meltdown, said Edwin Lyman, a nuclear energy expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group in Cambridge, Mass. .
Each party accuses the other of jeopardizing plant security.
Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces of using the plant as a staging base to launch missiles at the town of Nikopol, on the west bank of the Dnipro River .
Friday, days after
President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of "nuclear blackmail" as the two sides traded blame.
KYIV, Ukraine - At the start of the war in Ukraine, Russian troops took control of Europe's largest nuclear power plant after a fierce battle that included shrapnel hitting the structure of containment of Reactor No. 1. The resulting fire was quickly extinguished, a thick wall prevented a breach, and within five months the war, and world attention, shifted to new fronts, new outrages and new horrors.
The war had no shortage of devastation and global consequence - shifting geopolitical alliances, hunger in Africa exacerbated by missing grain exports, massacres of Ukrainian civilians, mass migrations and huge losses s of Ukrainian and Russian troops. Yet the repeated bombing of the sprawling Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in recent days has particularly sparked widespread fear and outrage at the sheer folly and existential danger of turning Europe's largest nuclear power plant into a theater of war. p>
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, addressing a nation late Thursday evening that still bears the scars of the nuclear disaster of the 1986 Chernobyl facility collapse, said the Kremlin was engaging in "undisguised nuclear blackmail" and called the situation at the plant "one of the greatest crimes of the terrorist state".
Neither side has an interest in a collapse which, in the worst case scenario, could result in widespread releases of deadly radioactive material, contaminating a territory spanning hundreds of thousands of miles, regardless of q ue is the direction in which the wind blew.
"The degree of infection of other territories of Ukraine Europe, Russia and Belarus depend from the direction of the wind,” said the State Agency for the Management of Exclusion Zones of Ukraine, which oversees the wastelands that still surround Chernobyl.
The plant's reactors are designed to withstand a range of hazards, from plane crashes to natural disasters. But direct rocket and missile fire may be another matter. Ukraine has so far resisted return fire from the plant with advanced US-supplied rocket systems for fear of hitting any of the six pressurized water reactors or stored highly radioactive waste .
But experts have expressed even more concern about the damage caused by fires if a shell were to hit a power transformer at the same time of the reactors. It could take the power grid offline, potentially causing the plant's cooling system to fail and leading to a catastrophic meltdown, said Edwin Lyman, a nuclear energy expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group in Cambridge, Mass. .
Each party accuses the other of jeopardizing plant security.
Ukrainian officials have accused Russian forces of using the plant as a staging base to launch missiles at the town of Nikopol, on the west bank of the Dnipro River .
Friday, days after
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