Ukrainian officials and firefighters have been unable to carry out their usual duties in the area to put out the fires due to Russian control of the facility, the update added. It also warned that fires could start within a “10-kilometer radius” [6.2 miles] significant radioactive waste and contamination could pose a “particular hazard”.
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Nuclear energy experts said the fires could also threaten critical power transmission lines, which have recently been repaired. “The biggest vulnerability of the plants themselves is a power outage,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Forest fires have already broken out near the decommissioned power plant, the scene of a 1986 disaster. Large amounts of radioactive material contaminated the land around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after the disaster and a nearby town was evacuated. Today, an “exclusion zone,” where radioactive contamination is highest, encompasses about 1,000 square miles around the facility.
Energoatom, Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear company, said Monday that Russia would seize the area meant crews there could no longer monitor radiation levels. The forest firefighting service is unable to work under Russian control.
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“There is no data on the current level of radiation exposure around the exclusion zone, which makes it impossible to adequately respond to threats,” Energoatom said, according to Reuters. “Radiation levels in the Exclusion Zone and beyond, including not only Ukraine but other countries as well, could deteriorate significantly.”
However, Ukraine’s Natural Resources Minister Ruslan Strelets said on Tuesday that radiation levels in the region are within norms, according to the AP.
The Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, has tried in vain to negotiate “a framework” that would allow IAEA experts to enter all of Ukraine’s nuclear facilities “to help maintain the safety of the sites.”
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Scientists say seasonal wildfires, which typically occur in spring and summer, can release radiation trapped in the upper layers of soil around the nuclear site. Lyman said tree roots also picked up radioactive cesium, which “could be released in a plume from the fires.”
Research published last year by the Center for Security Studies found that smoke from wildfires can carry radioactive material, raising “a cause for international concern”.
“Such wildfires produce uncontrollable, airborne and hazardous smoke that may contain radioactive material,” the research noted. “Given the half-life of certain radioisotopes, this problem will not go away in the lives of all living generations,” she added.
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With the onset of climate change, “nuclear wildfires pose an urgent but under-discussed problem” that deserves urgent attention, the study said.
“Due to the drier weather, fires are becoming more common,” said Kate Brown, professor of history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The dry weather has been “strongly felt” over the past decade, she added.
President Biden confirmed for the first time Russia’s use of a hypersonic missile in its invasion of Ukraine at a business roundtable event on March 21. (The White House)
On Monday, the IAEA, the UN nuclear regulatory agency, said a “long-delayed” rotation of technical personnel at the Chernobyl site had taken place was completed, allowing staff to return home for the first time since Russian troops occupied the site last month.
The Chernobyl zone, one of the most radioactively contaminated places in the world, has been closed since 1986, although a small number of people still live in the area – mostly elderly Ukrainians who refused to evacuate or returned after the area was evacuated.
The building that housed the reactor that blew up in 1986 was covered with a giant shield in 2017, intended to contain the radiation still emanating from the plant. Robots at the facility work to dismantle the destroyed reactor and collect radioactive waste. It is expected that it will take until 2064 to complete the safe dismantling of the reactors.