Had it been struck, there would have been the potential for a localized release of radioactive contamination.Įnergoatom also released several photos of battle damage to offices at the plant. That building is not as hardened, or reinforced against attacks and other catastrophic events, as the nuclear reactor buildings are. The location of the possible shell and the damage is within just a few hundred feet of the Unit 2 reactor building, says Tom Bielefeld, an independent nuclear security analyst based in Germany.īielefeld says that the walkway also runs alongside a building used to handle radioactive waste from the plant. The column of armored vehicles, led by the tanks, used spotlights to cautiously approach the plant from the southeast along the main service road to the facility. The livestream rolled on as Russian forces began a slow and methodical advance on the plant. local time, someone began livestreaming the plant's security footage on its YouTube channel. That is far more firepower than would have been carried by, say, a reconnaissance mission that might have stumbled across the plant by chance.
"It was planned," Hadavi says, and it involved around 10 armored vehicles as well as two tanks. The Russian decision to move on the plant was clearly premeditated, according to Leone Hadavi, an open-source analyst with the Centre for Information Resilience, who helped NPR review the video. A news release posted to its website just hours before the assault described the facility as operating normally, with its assigned Ukrainian military unit ready for combat. On March 3, the nuclear plant was preparing for a fight. "I'm aiming at having something relatively soon," he told reporters in Vienna. In a news conference on Thursday, Grossi said that he had met with Ukrainian and Russian officials but failed to reach an agreement to avoid future attacks on Ukraine's other nuclear plants. "It's completely insane to subject a nuclear plant to this kind of an assault," Lyman says. While the types of reactors used at the plant are far safer than the one that exploded in Chernobyl in 1986, the Russian attack could have triggered a meltdown similar to the kind that struck Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011, he warns. "This video is very disturbing," says Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The IAEA says two such lines were damaged in the attack. It also shows ordnance striking a high-voltage line outside the plant.
The security footage supports claims by Ukraine's nuclear regulator of damage at three other locations: the Unit 1 reactor building, the transformer at the Unit 6 reactor and the spent fuel pad, which is used to store nuclear waste.
In fact, the training building took multiple strikes, and it was hardly the only part of the site to take fire from Russian forces. But the new salt works at a slightly higher temperature than the previous one, so Transatomic will run tests to confirm that other materials in the reactor can withstand these higher temperatures.Europe Russian forces in Ukraine attack and seize Europe's largest nuclear power plant Transatomic is also using a new type of molten salt that should allow the reactor to burn nuclear waste, and also enable it to use nuclear material that couldn’t easily be repurposed to make a nuclear weapon. Among other things, the new experiments will determine whether that cladding will work as expected. But the new material has to be protected from the corrosive molten salts by silicon carbide. Transatomic’s design instead uses zirconium hydride, a more efficient material that should allow the reactor to be far smaller. The Oak Ridge design uses graphite for the part of a nuclear reactor that keeps nuclear reactions going by controlling the speed of neutrons emitted by the fission reactions. The experiments are a key step in an ambitious goal of building a demonstration reactor in the United States by 2020, Dewan says. Transatomic is paying to use facilities at MIT to conduct the experiments under a three-year agreement. CEO and cofounder Leslie Dewan says the company will conduct experiments to determine whether these new materials will perform as expected under the radioactive, high-temperature, and highly corrosive conditions found in a reactor.
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