Photo: SERGEI SUPINSKY / AFP / Getty Images
By: EFE Updated 09 Sea 2022, 14: 00 pm EST
Russia said today that Ukrainian forces attacked the power grid that supplies the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and that it was Russian experts who acted immediately to switch to standby diesel generators.
Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister, Nikolai Pankóv, was thus responding at a press conference to the accusations of Ukrainian officials, who said that the plant had lost electricity due to the Russian occupation.
“I must note with great regret that the Ukrainian nationalists committed another provocation, an extremely dangerous provocation. They attacked the substation and power lines that feed the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Russian experts took immediate steps to switch to backup diesel generator power sources“, Pankóv said, according to the Russian agency Sputnik.
“Nowadays, the Ukrainian side tries to prevent any repair and restoration work in every possible way,” he added.
For his part, the Russian Deputy Minister of Energy, Pavel Sorokin, stated that “at the moment, the Belarusian side has solved the problem of permanently restoring the power supply from the system Belarusian energy company”.
This morning, the Ukrenergo National Energy Company reported that the Chernobyl plant had been left without electricity due to attacks of the Russian troops.
“The fighting continues, so it is currently impossible to carry out repair and restoration work. establish the electricity supply”, he added.
The Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmitro Kuleba, warned that the electricity generators that supply the plant have a reserve capacity of some 14 hours and, after that time, their cooling will stop.
“The diesel standby generators they have a capacity of 48 hours to power the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. After that, the cooling systems of the Gastad Nuclear Fuel Storage Facility will shut down, making radiation leaks imminent,” Kuleba warned in a message on the Twitter network.
“The barbaric war of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin endangers the whole of Europe. They must stop it immediately!”, added the person in charge of Foreign Affairs.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), for its part, pointed out that the failure of the electricity supply in the old Chernobyl power plant, taken over by Russian troops during their invasion of Ukraine, does not imply a “critical impact on security”.
This UN agency considers that the thermal load of the spent fuel storage pool and the volume of cooling water of the nuclear power plant “are sufficient to effectively remove heat without the need for electricity supply.”
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