The Zaporizhzhia NPP is located in the city of Enerhodar, on the banks of the Dnieper river, just 200 kilometers from the conflicted Donbas region where Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces have been fighting. It is also 550 km south-east of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv.
It is one of the four nuclear power plants in Ukraine and also the largest nuclear power plant in Europe.
It produces one-fifth of the country’s electricity and contributes half of the country’s nuclear power generation.
It has six reactors, each with a power capacity of 950MW, making the total capacity of the plant 5,700MW, enough to power four million households.
The construction for the first reactor of the plant began in 1979, when Ukraine was a part of the USSR.
The first reactor of the plant was connected to the power grid in 1984 and the last one in 1995. All the reactors in the plant are VVVER-1000 or Pressurised Water Reactors (PWR), originally designed in the Soviet Union.
On March 2, the road outside the power plant was blocked by Ukrainians who were protesting the Russian incursion.
Why in news :
A day afterRussian forces allegedly attacked and captured Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine, a report claimed that the nuclear facility was back under Ukrainian control.
Illia Ponomarenko, a defence reporter at The Kyiv Independent, tweeted that the nuclear power plant – the largest in all of Europe – had been taken back by Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russia has denied Ukraine’s claim that it attacked the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
The Russian Defence Ministry spokesperson stated that Ukrainian claims of the attack on Zaporizhzhia coming from Moscow were an “attempt to blame Russia for causing a radioactive hotbed”. He said the shelling of the plant was a “lie”.
WHAT HAPPENED IN ZAPORIZHZHIA?
Russian forces reportedly captured Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant after it was set on fire as a result of heavy shelling.
Ukraine confirmed that the safety of the power plant was secured and the radiation level was normal.
According to Ukrainian officials, workers at the Zaporizhzhia plant were beingheld at gunpoint by Russian soldiers, CNN reported.
“Europeans, please wake up. Tell your politicians Russian troops are shooting at a nuclear power plant in Ukraine,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video address.
Zelenskyy said Russian tanks had shot at the nuclear reactor plants, though there was no evidence cited that they had been hit.
The United Nations Security Council held an urgent meeting after reports surfaced of the nuclear power plant coming under attack.
Was there danger of a disaster?
The IAEA said that it was informed by Ukraine’s power regulator that no change in radiation levels was reported at the Zaporizhzhia NPP. The United States’ Energy Secretary, Jennifer Granholm, said that the Nuclear reactors at the NPP were protected by “robust” containment structures.
Experts have said that this NPP is safer than the now defunct Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine, which was also recently captured by Russia.
The reactors in the Zaporizhzhia plant are Pressurised Water Reactors (PWR), which have a two-circuit design. This means that the nuclear-contaminated steam does not generate the final energy, but is used to power another circuit with non-contaminated steam, which in turn makes the turbines run. Experts have pointed out that these reactors also have a back-up cooling system for emergencies.
The operator of the power plant said that background radioactivity levels at the plant site were 0.1 microsieverts per hour, much below the accepted levels of radiation. In comparison with the levels during the Chernobyl disaster — 300 sieverts — this is many millions lower.
While Australian nuclear power plant expert Tony Irwin was quoted by The Guardian as saying that “the chances of explosion, nuclear meltdown or radioactive release are low,” he also added that it was “obviously” not a good idea to fire missiles at the reactors.
Another expert, Henry Sokolski, of the Nonproliferation Education Center, told Al Jazeera, that these plants were “never designed to be in a warzone,” adding that they are not capable of dealing with the vulnerabilities that come with being in a fire zone.
Sokolski also pointed out that if the power core of the reactor or its spent fuel pond were affected in such military operations, it would lead to massive release of radioactivity.