Yahoo Movies Defending Europe’s Largest Nuclear Plant From Becoming the Next Chernobyl
In March 2022, Russia took control of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in Ukraine, Europe’s largest nuclear power source.
If the conflict continues, experts fear a disaster involving a meltdown of the nuclear core, releasing tons of radioactive material into the environment.
Given how economically lucrative the facility is, there’s a chance Russia won’t risk a nuclear fallout.
As Russia’s siege on Ukraine nears its six-month mark, it’s come to a point where a nuclear catastrophe, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Chernobyl, may be imminent. These fears come as the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in southeastern Ukraine—the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, supplying half of Ukraine’s nuclear energy—came under intense bombardment earlier this month.
While the facility has been under Russian occupation since early March, it’s unclear who’s to blame; both Ukraine and Russia have pointed fingers at one another. So far, there’s been no significant damage to the nuclear plant, aside from rockets knocking out three radiation-monitoring detectors. But even that could hamper timely detection of any radiation leakage pending further damage. That’s according to Energoatom, Ukraine’s state-run nuclear power operator, which runs the Zaporizhzhia plant.
“[What’s] alarming to me is that this is the first time you really have an active takeover, a military takeover of a nuclear power plant in a conflict zone,” Sukesh Aghara, director of the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Integrated Nuclear Security and Safeguards Laboratory, tells Popular Mechanics.
In humanity’s history of nuclear energy, there’s simply no parallel for such a loaded scenario. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—these incidents all have informed and shaped public attitudes toward nuclear, to be sure, but it’s uncertain how the conditions at Zaporizhzhia will play out during the course of the conflict. So Popular Mechanics spoke to Aghara and two other nuclear safety experts to discuss what would happen in a worst-case scenario, and how we might prevent that situation from occurring in the first place.
How Do Nuclear Power Plants Work?
To fully grasp the makings of a (potentially impending) nuclear calamity, we first need to understand what nuclear energy is and how nuclear power plants generally operate.
Inside an atom, there’s a ton of energy stored in the core, or nucleus, which we can’t really get to unless we split the atom apart. This splitting apart, or nuclear fission, happens when a subatomic particle called a neutron is blasted at the nucleus, fragmenting it into smaller nuclei. This releases that stored energy in the form of heat and radiation.
In a nuclear power plant, this reaction occurs within a reactor containing nuclear fuel, typically a mixture of uranium isotopes, says Steven Snay, director of radiation safety at UMass Lowell and a board-certified health physicist.
“The energy created from the splitting heats up water,” he explains to Popular Mechanics. “Some [nuclear plants] heat up water directly, that water spins turbines, the turbines spin the generator, and the generator produces electricity.”
Other nuclear facilities may instead convert the heated water into steam, which drives the turbines and the generators, producing electricity. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station has six Soviet-designed water-water energetic reactors, or VVRs, which operate this way. However, only two reactors are currently running, according to August 7 data from the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency.
Regardless of how it’s done, water is a vital component of nuclear power, not just for electricity generation, but in keeping the reactor core and its fuel rods cool. An overheated reactor core, after all, can spell disaster.
Where Can Things Go Wrong?
Before you go off thinking nuclear facilities are literal ticking time bombs, scientists have spent decades considering long and hard how to best protect a power plant’s weak spots. These vulnerabilities include the durability of the nuclear core’s containment structure, spent fuel storage, power to the cooling systems, and whether there’s a well-trained technical workforce to service it.
“In general, containment structures are constructed to not only contain but be a barrier to all aircraft or even larger aircraft crashing into them,” Rodney Ewing, a professor of geological sciences and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy, tells Popular Mechanics.
But containment structures aren’t invulnerable against missile attacks, says Ewing, which the Zaporizhzhia facility saw on August 7 when rockets landed near spent fuel storage.
“Cruise missiles designed to penetrate these [containment] structures are called bunker busters. I would presume they would be able to breach the reactor core,” he says.
Direct hits from any intentional or errant rockets wouldn’t only compromise the integrity of the containment structures; they could also hit stores of spent nuclear fuels—the leftovers from nuclear fission that have no more stored energy to offer, but are still very radioactive and thermally hot. Based on 2017 estimates from the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), says Ewing, there could be as much as 2,200 tons of spent fuels in metal casks. During the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, for instance, an emission of hydrogen from the spent fuel pool caused an explosion in the plant’s fourth reactor.
But the heavy-hitter of catastrophic nuclear events, which has nuclear experts waiting with bated breath, is a loss-of-coolant accident (or LOCA). This is when a nuclear reactor core overheats (and then explodes) because it’s not being sufficiently cooled, whether due to a loss of water or a loss of electricity that these cooling systems rely on.
Snay says many of the redundancies baked into a nuclear power plant are to prevent LOCAs. This is done by not having just one mainline source of cooling or electricity, but multiple ones that can operate independently of each other in the event one or more cooling or electrical systems go down.
“If I have a reactor [with] four independent coolant lines, four independent steam generators, four independent reactor coolant pumps, we know that any of them can do the job. If we sever a coolant line and isolate [it]” the remaining systems will be able to pick up the slack, he explains.
It’s not clear whether the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant’s failsafes are up to code. The Soviet Union built the facility between the 1970s and the 1990s, so it may have a range of different safety features, says Ewing.
That brings us to the last category of nuclear things going wrong: the plant workers themselves (looking at you, Homer Simpson).
“[What’s] not so well-appreciated is [that] you need a well-trained force of technical people running the reactor,” Ewing explains. “If their work is disrupted, if they’re kept captive, or if they’re not allowed to rest, as was the case at Chernobyl [when Russian forces trapped around 300 staff back in early 2022], that is a major concern. Do we have people who know what they’re doing?”
According to the latest reports, Ukrainian technicians are still running the Zaporizhzhia facility. Staff have gone missing, though—presumably at the hands of Russian forces—and workers report highly stressful working conditions in a recent interview with The Washington Post.
What Would the Aftermath Look Like?
When the No. 4 reactor at Chernobyl went out of control in 1986, it led to a massive explosion, a release of large amounts of radiation into the environment, and the evacuation of 35,000 people from the region. Thirty-six years later, we’re still reeling from its effects, says Snay.
While there are key differences that make Zaporizhzhia not entirely on par with Chernobyl, such as better containment and safety measures, the concern of a nuclear fallout is no less grave. Potentially, it could be even worse, Yevhenii Tsymbaliuk, Ukraine’s permanent representative to the IAEA, tells the BBC.
So how bad are we talking? Snay and Ewing explain the reach and longevity of the nuclear fallout depends on two factors: the nature of the radioactive particles, and the prevailing weather conditions like wind direction or an upward draft (this especially can determine whether the radioactivity reaches Earth’s upper atmosphere and spreads to the rest of the world).
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Remember how nuclear fission leads to smaller nuclei? Well, these smaller nuclei come in the form of elements like cesium, strontium, iodide, and plutonium—all which have varying abilities to live in the environment (whether preferring air, water, or soil), and decay at different rates. For example, Cesium-137 would need about 300 years to decay into nothing and tends to be sticky. Plutonium-239, on the other hand, takes about 24,000 years to reduce by half its initial amount (what’s called a half-life).
Radiation in the environment sounds scary, but there’s actually quite a lot of it naturally occurring in our world and even within our own bodies, such as in the form of radioactive Carbon-14 (what scientists use for carbon-dating organic materials). Our bodies also have a way of repairing any cellular or genetic damage that radiation causes. But only to some extent: low levels of radiation don’t cause immediate health effects, but have been found to cause an increase in one’s cancer risk over time. In the aftermath of Chernobyl, cancer rates of Ukrainian children living in the area increased by more than 90 percent. A 2006 Greenpeace International report estimated nearly 100,000 people in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia died due to health conditions related to radiation exposure.
“We always get a dose of radioactivity when we fly on a plane or go to the doctor’s office [like when getting an x-ray],” says Ewing. “But this is a really strong dose so it’s a really serious environmental hazard.”
But Wait, There Is a Silver Lining
Had enough of the worst-case scenario? Here’s some hope: it’s equally possible a nuclear catastrophe can be averted entirely, especially as it would prove lucrative for Russia.
“A number of people have written on this, and I buy into this idea that, at least in this particular scenario, the Russians are more interested in connecting the nuclear power plant to Crimea and in doing so, they essentially make Ukraine more economically unstable,” says Aghara.
In the broader context of the international community’s commitment to nuclear safeguards, destroying a power plant would be a bad look for Russia, not just as a member state of the IAEA, but as a major global supplier of nuclear fuel and reactors.
“[This situation] opens up an additional [factor] that goes beyond the safety of people, which I know everyone’s really concerned about,” says Aghara. “But this sort of complicates what we think about [nuclear] safeguards and how future assurances can be done.”
“The Russians, I believe—not that I speak for them—from a safety standpoint understand the ramifications of [Zaporizhzhia], of Chernobyl, and they understand that as a nuclear power themselves,” says Snay.
While we can’t presume to know what the Russians think, let’s hope for the sake of Ukraine and the rest of the world that is indeed the case.
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