This is “the culmination of six months of painstaking international negotiations aimed at preventing a catastrophe” nuclear, summarizes the Washington Post. “A convoy of 20 vehicles” carrying International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) officers to inspect the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine arrived on Wednesday after a nine-hour trip to the city of the same name, reports the Spanish daily ABC.
Made up of 14 experts, the team must go Thursday to the site occupied since the beginning of March by the Russians and whose surroundings are regularly bombarded. This “mission – which aims to assess the damage, check the security systems and assess the working conditions of the staff -, is the most important operation carried out by the IAEA since the Chernobyl accident in 1986”recalls the Wall Street Journal.
The director general of the UN agency, Rafaelo Grossi, specified that the experts would pass “A few days” there and that they had received security guarantees from the Russian and Ukrainian authorities. “We will try to establish a permanent agency presence”he also claimed – a scenario not mentioned until then.
The Russian authorities, for their part, have indicated that they intend to limit the team’s access to the plant. According to Guardianthey said on Wednesday that IAEA experts would be allowed access for a single day and that the mission would have to join the queue of civilians shuttling between Ukrainian and Russian-held territories. “If this happens, it could delay or disrupt the visit”notes the British daily.
“Never safe from error”
Ukraine at the same time called on Russian forces on Wednesday to stop firing on the road leading to the plant. The Russians carried out strikes on the city of Energodar, close to these installations, to give the impression to international experts that it was the soldiers of kyiv who bombarded their surroundings, affirmed Yevguen Yevtouchenko, the head of the administration Ukrainian woman from Nikopol, a town on the other side of the Dnieper. Moscow and kyiv have been accusing each other for weeks of endangering the safety of the plant.
“If the potential danger comes above all” of one “loss of cooling systems” and therefore of a “risk of nuclear fuel meltdown”, it is not impossible that a shell or a missile accidentally falls on the containment of one of the reactors, explained the Belgian nuclear expert Pierre-Etienne Labeau daily The evening. Ces structures “protect against the fall of an F16 type fighter plane or an airliner, but they were not designed to withstand missile fire”he says. “With Zaporizhia, we see that there is a desire on the part of the belligerents to roll over the mechanics by targeting outlying buildings… I don’t think that one of the parties will dare to attack a reactor, but we are never safe from error”.
On the spot, the Ukrainian authorities continued Wednesday to distribute to the population of the region iodine tablets to protect them from radiation in the event of a nuclear accident. “We must hope that there will be no disaster”told the New York Times, Olga Stepanenko, 64, a grandmother who came to the hospital to collect tablets for her grandchildren. “But you always have to prepare for the worst”she concludes.