Chernobyl plant has reconnected to national power grid, says nuclear agency

Ukraine has informed the UN Nuclear Agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that the Chernobyl nuclear power plant has been reconnected to the national power grid after losing power at the site last Wednesday.

“Ukrainian expert teams managed over the weekend to repair one of the two damaged lines connecting the plant to the power grid,” the IAEA said on Tuesday (15).

As of Monday, the site received all the power it needed from the repaired line, allowing the team to shut down the emergency diesel generators they had been relying on since March 9, it said in a statement.

Since Russian troops took control of the nuclear plant on February 24, the 211 technicians and guards at the plants have not been able to leave, meaning they have “lived there for the past three weeks”, according to the watchdog.

The Ukrainian regulator told the IAEA that the information it received about Chernobyl was “controlled by Russian military forces” and that, consequently, it could not “always provide detailed answers to all” questions asked.

The regulator also said officials at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Zaporizhzhia, in southeastern Ukraine, “confirmed reports that the Russian military detonated munitions left at the site after the events of March 4,” the press release said.

The team was not informed before the detonations took place, the watchdog said, adding that the “regulator has informed the IAEA in recent days of work in progress to detect and dispose of unexploded ordnance found at the damaged training center and elsewhere. of the nuclear power plant.”

“The episode aside. What this indicates is that the situation is extremely volatile, extremely fragile. What you have there is a site containing six nuclear reactors, which is under the control of the Russian Armed Forces. The operators are the Ukrainian operators. Of course, this leads to the possibility of friction,” warned IAEA chief Rafael Grossi in an interview with France 24.

In Ukraine, there were “several situations” where “basic safety guidelines or norms” were “compromised, if not completely violated” in the past week, Grossi said.

The Ukrainian regulator told the IAEA that “eight of the country’s 15 reactors continue to operate, including two at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, three at Rivne, one at Khmelnytskyy and two in southern Ukraine,” adding that “radiation levels across all nuclear plants are in the normal range.”