The Zaporozhye nuclear power plant was without power for hours on Thursday and the world narrowly avoided a radiation disaster, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned on Friday.
It is the largest plant of its kind in Europe, so the consequences would have been catastrophic if the auxiliary generators that provided electricity for the cooling and security systems had not been put into operation.
Zoran Tesanovic, deputy director of the State Regulatory Agency for Radiation and Nuclear Safety, explains to “Avaz” that facilities like Zaporizhzhya depend on the nuclear fuel cooling system and that there must be no reactor overheating in them.
He adds that Zaporozhye is technologically different compared to Chernobyl, it was built with multiple levels of protection, but that during the construction period no one counted on the possibility of war around it.
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, a special team of the Agency for Radiation and Nuclear Safety (DARNS) of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been monitoring the situation, and receives data on the level of radiation daily from around 3,500 points from the database of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
“The situation in the last twenty days has been critical and there is a very real danger of a nuclear disaster, even of a larger scale. This is what worries me, as the Deputy Director of the State Agency and contact person with the IAEA. These facts should be of interest to our public, and especially to the holders of responsible positions in BiH, who should take certain steps tomorrow if such a thing happens, but also before, while all this is going on. We all hope that it won’t happen, we pray to God that it doesn’t happen, because it really could be a large-scale disaster,” Tesanovic points out.
System testing
He reminds that BiH has a national action plan that defines the sequence of actions in the event of a radiation hazard, and that the Council of Ministers and entity governments must have ready answers.
“It is our obligation to be ready to react in the event of a disaster, including a nuclear one. We wrote to the Council of Ministers and the Ministry of Security and gave information that it is necessary to carry out certain preparatory or testing measures of our system. I had contact with the FBiH Ministry of Health, which informed me of the positions taken by the FBiH Government,” says Tesanovic.
After threats to use nuclear weapons, the question is what measures BiH should eventually take.
“At this moment, it is not necessary for people to run and buy iodine. Such a measure is not foreseen for the case of such an incident, iodine is implemented in some other circumstances. Completely different measures are implemented here,” protection of water supply zones, agricultural land, control of the purchase and import of products that could possibly be contaminated, explains Tesanovic, Avaz writes.
