Commercial plants have built-in safety systems, but aren’t designed with warfare in mind
People around the world watched via livestreamed security camera as Russian forces attacked and took over Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant—the largest in Europe—on Friday morning local time. Amid the shelling and gunfire, a fire broke out at a training facility in the complex and was later extinguished, according to news reports.
The six reactors at Zaporizhzhia are called VVER-1000s, and they are cooled and moderated by light [ordinary] water. So in that respect, they’re similar to U.S. pressurized water reactors. They are somewhat more advanced models than the earlier versions of [this type of reactor], so they do have some features that are more in line with modern safety philosophy—but not entirely.
The modern reactors of this type have emergency core cooling systems so that, if there’s a breach in a cooling pipe, they have systems that can inject emergency coolant directly. And these [VVER-1000s] do have those kinds of systems, unlike some of the earlier versions of these Soviet reactors. Before this attack, was there growing concern in the nuclear community that something like this could and potentially cause accidents?
If there were damage at the Zaporizhzhia plant, what kind of explosion or radiation leakage might happen? I think the particular type of release from Chernobyl—which was pretty large and was injected high into the atmosphere and was widely distributed—that’s probably less likely with a reactor like this. If you look at Fukushima, the releases were smaller, and they didn’t disperse over as wide an area. It’s certainly a regional concern. But if multiple reactors are affected at the same time, if the spent fuel is damaged, if the containment is mechanically breached, then all bets are off.
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