Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant faces record blackout

The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine has now entered its sixth day running on emergency diesel generators, deepening fears of a potential nuclear disaster.

The U.N. atomic watchdog’s chief, Rafael Grossi, said in a post on X on Monday that the plant has been without offsite power for six days. He added that he met Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha in Warsaw to discuss the crisis and that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is working to help restore power.

External electricity was cut last Tuesday in what Greenpeace Ukraine described as the longest outage at the six-reactor facility since Russia seized it in 2022. The blackout has left the plant reliant on backup generators to cool reactor cores and spent fuel, with experts warning of risks comparable to Fukushima in 2011 if systems fail.

Ukraine’s Energy Minister Svitlana Hrynchuk said Russian shelling damaged the last transmission line linking the site to Ukraine’s grid, calling the loss of power a “significant violation” of safe operations and noting it was the tenth such incident since the invasion. Russia, however, insisted the facility has enough diesel reserves for continued generator use.

The Zaporizhzhia plant in southern Ukraine has been under Russian control since the early weeks of the war, with both Moscow and Kyiv repeatedly accusing each other of shelling the area.

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