Most UN inspectors leave embattled nuclear plant
By Andrew E. Kramer
ZAPORIZHZHIA — Most of a team of United Nations inspectors departed the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant on Thursday (Sept 1) after a short risky visit to assess its safety, leaving behind five experts to monitor the plant, where shelling has raised the risk of a nuclear accident, Ukraine’s nuclear energy company said.
Just four hours after the team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) arrived, the head of the agency and leader of the mission, Rafael M. Grossi, left the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the Ukrainian company, Energoatom, said.
Five members of the team were “unloading the equipment they brought and will continue working at the plant” until Saturday (3), the company said in a statement. It not immediately clear what equipment they had brought or what tasks they would carry out in the coming days.
The IAEA had said earlier that the monitors, who braved heavy shelling on their journey across the front line in southern Ukraine, were going to the plant “to conduct indispensable nuclear safety and security and safeguards activities.” Their mission included checking on safety systems, assessing damage to the plant and evaluating the staff’s working conditions.
Among the main concerns the agency has raised is that fires or other damage from shelling could cause cooling systems to fail and lead to a nuclear meltdown.
Hours before they arrived, Russian artillery shells struck the sprawling complex and caused damage, Energoatom said, highlighting the safety risks the team had come to assess.
It took weeks of delicate negotiations for Russia and Ukraine to agree to the IAEA visit, but it remained unclear how much the experts would be able to do during a short visit to the nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, which lies in an intensifying combat zone and has been repeatedly struck by shelling.
An IAEA spokesman earlier said the team intended to present its findings back at its headquarters in Vienna by the end of the week.
As the UN experts set off on Thursday morning in a convoy of armoured SUVs toward a dangerous buffer zone separating the two armies, Russian mortar shells struck the plant, Energoatom said, causing equipment failures that forced the shutdown of one reactor and the activation of backup generators at another.
The extent of damage from the strikes was not immediately clear, and there were no reports of heightened radiation levels around the facility. But weeks of repeated strikes in and around the plant, which is controlled by Russian forces but operated by Ukrainian engineers, have raised fears of a nuclear catastrophe.
Although neither Russia nor Ukraine had agreed to a cease-fire in the area, both had said they would guarantee the safety of the mission. As the shelling continued despite those promises, both armies accused the other of attacking the route toward the plant and placing the U.N. inspectors in peril.
Foreign journalists were not permitted to accompany the inspectors, who are among the few international personnel who have crossed the front line since the war began in February.
Edwin Lyman, a nuclear power expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that experts could inspect the state of all the emergency systems as well as the diesel supply, and then make arrangements for replenishing it.
-New York Times
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