Russia has been accused of deliberately sabotaging the last remaining power line into the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, after satellite imagery of the damaged area showed no sign of Ukrainian shelling that Moscow says is preventing a repair.
Outside power, normally used for cooling, has now been down for a record eight days, forcing the Russian operators of the plant in occupied Ukraine to rely on back-up diesel generators to avoid a meltdown of its six reactor cores.
The photography was commissioned by Greenpeace and it was examined by experts at McKenzie Intelligence, in an effort to assess the damage at the Zaporizhzhia plant, which lies on the frontline of the war.
McKenzie Intelligence concluded in a short report that there is “no evidence of any crater, either fresh or historic” around the damaged pylon and that it is still standing “and therefore should be a relatively simple task to repair”.
That contrasts with comments made last week by the Russian operators of the plant. The site’s communications director said on 25 September that “restoration efforts [were] currently being complicated by ongoing shelling by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the area of the plant and in the immediate vicinity of the damaged line”.
The plant’s final external power line was cut at 4.56pm on Tuesday last week, creating a set of circumstances described by Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, as “clearly not a sustainable situation in terms of nuclear safety”.
Eight back-up generators are currently powering the cooling systems, with a further nine in reserve, said the IAEA in an update released on Tuesday. There is enough power to fuel the generators for 10 days, with further deliveries expected to maintain this level, the watchdog added.
Though the imagery of a pylon over a field in Russian held territory about 1.5km from the power plant is faint, the absence of dark pock marks on the ground, characteristic of areas that have been shelled, is obvious. Both legs of the pylon and a horizontal connecting structure are visible.
Shaun Burnie, a nuclear specialist with Greenpeace, said the imagery showed that “Russia has deliberately sabotaged the external power line”.
Ukraine believes that Russia’s goal is political, to force a crisis that will allow Moscow to assert its control over the site. At present the final power line runs from the nuclear plant, across the Dnipro river, to Ukrainian-held territory, where it had been maintained to avoid safety being compromised.
But an unpublished document submitted by Russia to the IAEA dated 3 June, detailing the situation at the plant, indicates that an alternative plan was being prepared by Moscow.
The document states that in the event of the external power lines to the plant being disconnected from Ukraine “a procedure for voltage transmission … from the unified power system of Russia” had “been developed”.
A earlier analysis by Greenpeace of satellite imagery published on Saturday showed 125 miles of construction of a new high voltage line from the Russian grid in the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol, though it is unclear if a final connection to the power plant has been made.
The Russian occupiers built a dam across an inlet channel at the site in the summer in order to create a smaller, more secure water source. Experts believe there is enough water available for Russia to restart one of the six reactors, to assert that only it can run the site.
Last month, Yuriy Chernichuk, the Russian-appointed director of the plant, said the process of integrating the site into the Russian grid was “in its final stages”, though a restart of any nuclear reactor during a war would be unprecedented.
Zaporizhzhia’s six reactors are currently running in a state of cold shutdown, operating at below boiling point, but Ukrainian sources say there would be a risk that the nuclear fuel in the six reactors would heat uncontrollably over a period of weeks, eventually leading to a meltdown.
An accelerated version of this scenario happened at the Japanese nuclear plant at Fukushima in 2011 because the reactors had just been operating.
A 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck Japan and the hot reactors on the site were automatically shut down in response. Emergency generators continued to pump cooling water around the reactor but these were knocked out by a tsunami that followed minutes later.
Three nuclear cores at the plant melted down within three days, though the fuel remained contained. Nobody was killed but more than 100,000 people were evacuated.
