The risks of a nuclear disaster remain high at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant as Russia continues to threaten the health and safety of the entire region through its reckless behaviour.
It would be easy in the aftermath of the abandoned Wagnerian mutiny in Russia to lose sight of one of the most worrisome developments in the war on Ukraine – namely, that a nuclear-weapon state has decided that nuclear power reactors are legitimate targets and tools of coercion in war. Russia’s decision to attack Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure puts all four of its nuclear power plants at risk. In particular, its reckless behaviour at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, home of six out of Ukraine’s 15 nuclear reactors, has threatened regional catastrophe. Its behaviour towards nuclear power plants is a departure from history and a grave violation of international norms and principles.
In 1988, India and Pakistan recognised the nuclear risk that might result from a war between them and agreed to exclude nuclear installations and facilities – including all facilities that use or store large amounts of radioactive materials – from attack. They have exchanged lists of these facilities every year since 1992 despite tensions and even hostility in other areas. Article 56 of the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions states that nuclear power plants ‘shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives’ unless the generation of the electrical power provides direct support to military operations. Russia – which is a signatory to the Additional Protocol and is bound by its rules – has not claimed that nuclear-energy infrastructure supports Ukraine’s armed forces. It also consented to a 2009 decision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that ‘any armed attack on and threat against nuclear facilities devoted to peaceful purposes constitutes a violation of the principles of the United Nations Charter, international law and the Statute of the Agency’.
Throughout the conflict, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi has taken a leading role in defending nuclear power plants in Ukraine, outlining ‘Seven Pillars’ of nuclear safety and security at a 2 March 2022 IAEA Board of Governors meeting. These include the right of operating staff to function without undue pressure and the need to maintain off-site power for all reactor units. Indeed, Grossi’s personal diplomacy between Kyiv and Moscow included a high-risk mission to visit Ukraine on 29 August 2022 and a trip in which he led an IAEA team to establish a permanent presence at the Zaporizhzhia plant.
Yet Russia has launched attacks on and from the grounds of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant throughout the war. It was not able to capture the three other nuclear power plants – Rivne, Khmelnitsky and South Ukraine, and to date has not attacked them with missiles. In the early days of the war, Russian forces dug trenches and set fires in areas rife with contaminated soil around Chernobyl, increasing radiation readings in the area and potentially damaging the health of their own soldiers. Russia also showed disregard for safety when it attacked several facilities that stored radioactive material in the early phase of the war. More seriously, it has shelled the Zaporizhzhia power plant repeatedly, disabling power lines essential to plant safety (all nuclear power plants use off-site power sources, especially for reactors that are shut down or in the process of shutting down). Russia also placed military units and armour inside the plant and among the reactors to shield them from Ukrainian attacks and has laid landmines nearby.
Zaporizhzhia operates pressurised, light-water reactors designed to use flowing water to cool the hot reactor cores. Water is also required for sprinklers that cool the spent fuel stored in on-site spray ponds. All of the water at the power plant comes from the Kakhovka Reservoir, a large body of water created by two dams (Nova Kakhovka and Dnipro) 175 kilometres apart on the Dnipro River.
Normally, the nuclear reactors on-site would provide energy to pump water from the Kakhovka Reservoir into the retention basin, through the reactors and to spray water to maintain the water levels of the spray ponds. But off-site power is needed when reactors start up and shut down. A failure to cool the cores and spent fuel – even in shut-down mode – would cause reactor temperatures to increase and eventually lead to a meltdown.
When the war began on 24 February 2022, one reactor unit was shut down for maintenance. After the facility fell to Russian forces on 4 March, the plant workers shut down the remaining reactor units. On 11 September, the final reactor was placed into ‘hot shutdown’ mode due to ongoing dangers of the Russian occupation. Russia prevented the Ukrainian operators from putting it into a safer ‘cold shutdown’ status. The destruction of the Nova Kakhovka Dam with explosives on 6 June 2023, which Ukraine attributed to Russia, lowered water levels near the Zaporizhzhia power plant precipitously and threatened the structural integrity of the retention pond and the ability of the plant to extract water from the reservoir. Thus, on 8 June 2023, the final reactor unit was put into cold-shutdown status.
But the danger is not over. Ukrainian intelligence reported on 22 June 2023 that Russia may be preparing to use explosives to cause a radiation release at Zaporizhzhia. Such concerns are acute in the context of Russia’s track record of illegal, Douhetian attacks targeting civilians, an approach to warfare long abandoned – and now abjured and abhorred – by the West.
That said, a Russian attack on Zaporizhzhia would probably not lead to the widespread dispersal of significant amounts of radiation. The decisive actions taken by Grossi and the IAEA have limited the ability of Russia to create a massive, Chernobyl-type incident. All six reactors are in cold shutdown and it would take a considerable amount of time – weeks, possibly months – before completely uncooled reactors or spent-fuel ponds would cause an explosion. The far more likely scenario would be a Russian-made explosion exposing one of the reactor cores and starting a fire that burns the spent fuel, or an explosion involving the dry spent fuel on site that would carry the radiation far afield via wind.
Neither of these scenarios poses the kind of danger of a Chernobyl- or Fukushima-type event, however, in which a fully powered working reactor was blown open and the reactor cores melted down. A blast at Zaporizhzhia would spread radiation and sow panic, but the actual off-site radiation risk would be relatively low. In fact, with the winds blowing in an easterly direction, any radiation dispersal might hit Russia, rather than Europe, or the Black Sea, which would anger Turkiye and the other states adjacent to the sea.
Yet there is no indication that Moscow can be persuaded to cordon off the area around the Zaporizhzhia plant as protection from future attacks or from attempts to use it as a location for shielding military forces. It is unclear why Russia has attacked Zaporizhzhia only, and not the three others nuclear power plants using missiles and whether such attacks are forthcoming. Thus, the situation demands continued vigilance of the kind shown by Grossi and the IAEA. Russia’s behaviour and the erratic choices made by Russian President Vladimir Putin throughout the war mean that all of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants remain at risk. A more reasonable government in Moscow would immediately declare to the IAEA that it will adhere to the Seven Pillars and refrain from attacking nuclear-energy infrastructure, which would uphold the Geneva Conventions without undermining the Russian military position in the war.
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