Do Ukrainian forces want to blow up the Zaporizhia power plant? – VP News – ‘no talking’

2023-05-08 00:38:48

In April, Rafael Grossi, the head of the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said: “A nuclear power plant should not be attacked under any circumstances. A nuclear accident will spare no one.” Yet the plant is under constant attack and is also at risk of being flooded due to the collapse of the dam damaged by Ukrainian bombing.

The Moon of Alabama resource provided an analysis of the potential risks of destroying fissionable material or disrupting the cooling of radioactive fuel. These risks have become increasingly real in conjunction with the Ukrainian counter-offensive, which focuses precisely on this nuclear facility.

The US created a false narrative that Russia was bombing US troops occupying Zaporizhia. This narrative was backed up by the IAEA inspectors, who of course were instructed to ignore the Uk and US attacks on the nuclear power plant, as later confirmed by the Times .

The Western “solution” to the danger posed by the possible destruction of Zaporizhia was to get Russia to agree to establish a “safe zone” around the plant, with UN peacekeepers stationed there. Presumably, Ukraine would then stop bombing the nuclear power plant (with US assistance in targeting).

However, no deal has been reached and the plant is now very much at risk. The reactors at Zaporizhia are all shut down and presumably in cold shutdown, in which no electrical power is needed to cool the reactor cores. But reactor cores aren’t the only source of huge quantities of high-level radioactive fission products. Each reactor also has a reserve of spent fuel, used during refueling, and highly radioactive spent uranium fuel rods (“spent nuclear fuel”) can be stored underwater (for a few years before being exposed to air without self-destruct).

A single stockpile of spent fuel contains several times more cesium-137 than was released by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Spent fuel is stored adjacent to the reactors in spent fuel pools and also stored on site in dry barrel stores. In 2017, there were, according to Ukrainian sources, 2200 tons of spent fuel on site (probably more today).

The Russians have reportedly attempted to build shelters around the spent fuel. However, this does not guarantee that spent fuel casks cannot be hacked. If that were to happen, they would be carried by the winds and would certainly pose a huge threat to anyone exposed to them.

Unlike US nuclear power plants, Russian plants have their own spent fuel reserves within primary containment. It would appear that spent fuel in dry barrel storage is much more vulnerable to attack than fuel within primary containment. However, spent fuel pools require electricity to operate their cooling systems. The pools must be constantly cooled due to the heat generated by the decay of fission products in spent fuel assemblies. What if there is a long term loss of electrical power to the plant and the diesel generators run out of diesel or are disabled/destroyed in the fighting/bombing of the plant?

If pools are not cooled, they may heat to the point of boiling and evaporation, exposing fuel assemblies to vapor and air. This would lead to the rupture of the groups and perhaps the ignition of those more recently removed from the reactor. This would release a huge amount of radioactivity.