The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Tuesday it had lost contact with the remote transmission of data from safeguard monitoring systems installed at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, which was seized by Russian forces in the month. past.
The Chernobyl site is currently not operational and handling of nuclear material has stopped, the IAEA said, citing information from Ukraine’s nuclear regulator.
The facility has decommissioned reactors as well as radioactive waste facilities. The regulatory authority told the IAEA it could only communicate with the plant by email.
“The Agency is reviewing the status of safeguard monitoring systems elsewhere in Ukraine and will provide more information shortly,” the IAEA said in a statement.
The agency said it had been informed by Ukrainian officials that it was becoming “increasingly urgent” to rotate personnel for the “safe management” of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, where about 210 employees have been working for nearly two weeks since forces began to work. Russians seized control of the facility.
Staff have been effectively living at the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster in the past 13 days, and while they have access to food, water and medicine to a “limited extent”, their situation is “getting worse”, the IAEA said, by Ukraine’s nuclear regulator. .
“I am deeply concerned about the difficult and stressful situation that employees at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant face and the potential risks this poses to nuclear safety,” IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in a statement.
Eight of Ukraine’s 15 nuclear reactors are currently operating, Ukraine’s nuclear regulator told the IAEA, and that radiation levels still appear to be normal.
The team managed to change shifts at operational sites, including at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhya, which is now also under Russian control.
Source: CNN Brasil
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