‘Sheer madness’ Nuclear expert Dmitry Gorchakov on the fire at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia power plant and Putin’s plan to bring it back online
Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has been under Russian control since the first weeks of Moscow’s full-scale invasion. The station hasn’t generated electricity since September 2022; the only parts of it operating are those necessary for cooling its reactors. While the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has observers on site, this hasn’t stopped Russia from using the facility to store troops and military equipment. Rosatom, the Russian state energy corporation that now runs the occupied plant, said on August 11 that the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) had carried out two drone strikes against one of the station’s cooling towers, sparking a fire. The station’s Russian-installed communications director reported that this was the first time the facility had “suffered serious damage due to a Ukrainian attack”; meanwhile, the IAEA experts at the station did not weigh in on which side caused the fire. Meduza turned to nuclear expert Dmitry Gorchakov, an advisor at the Norwegian environmental organization Bellona, for insight into the dangers facing the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
In September 2022, six months after Russian forces captured Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), the facility was brought into shutdown: control rods were inserted into the reactors to halt the fission reactions. The move was a response to shelling in the station’s vicinity that threatened both the station itself and the power lines that are essential for cooling its nuclear fuel (even when the reactors are in shutdown).
Most of the plant’s reactors were put into “cold shutdown,” meaning they were depressurized and no longer require active cooling. However, at least one of the reactors, and at times two, were kept in “hot shutdown,” meaning they continued producing a limited amount of energy, to meet local winter power needs. This continued until April 2024, when all six reactors were brought into cold shutdown for the first time, causing officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to breathe a sigh of relief.
While the agency continues to characterize the safety situation as “precarious,” expert Dmitry Gorchakov told Meduza that the safety level of a nuclear plant in full shutdown is “fairly high.” At the same time, he said, there’s no guarantee that the reactors will remain in shutdown.
“[In recent months,] there have been high-level negotiations involving Putin and IAEA head [Rafael] Grossi,” Gorchakov said. “The topic was raised of putting the Zaporizhzhia NPP back into operation — specifically by bringing at least one reactor back online to generate power.”
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Gorchakov noted that Russia’s bid to restart a reactor comes despite the fact that fighting in the area is still ongoing. “If the station is hit by shelling, the reactor system is damaged, or, God forbid, a reactor itself is struck, the risk of disaster would be much higher and the potential consequences much worse [than when the reactors are in shutdown],” he said.
By initiating discussions about resuming operations at the Zaporizhzhia NPP, Russia “wants to show that it’s serious and that it’s here to stay,” the expert continued. “It’s hard to say how fully the Russian authorities understand the risks of relaunching the plant. But we already see them making certain preparations.”
Gorchakov and his colleagues are watching for three signs in particular that he says would indicate Russia has imminent plans to bring a reactor back online.
“Firstly, Russia has begun telling the IAEA that it plans to build a new pumping station. They need this to fill a new cooling pond,” Gorchakov told Meduza. Since the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in 2023, he said, Russia has not had the cooling capacity to restart operations at the Zaporizhzhia NPP. The planned pumping station would solve this issue, he explained, and Russia could feasibly complete construction by the end of this year.
The second sign would be if Russia connects the Zaporizhzhia plant to its power grid. “Right now, it’s connected to Ukraine’s power grid, and obviously Russia’s not going to restart operations while that’s the case,” Gorchakov said. “It will need to be switched over to the energy system of Russia and the occupied territories.” He said that ongoing construction at the Zaporizhzhia thermal power plant, which is located next to the NPP, indicates that preparations to link both facilities to the Russian grid may already be underway.
The third sign, which international experts haven’t observed so far, would be if Russia started refueling of one of the NPP’s reactors. “If this starts to happen, we’ll be able to say with a high degree of confidence that they’re getting ready to launch the station: it’s the final step,” he said.
If Russia really does bring the station back into operation, according to Gorchakov, the risks would be high — and the potential reward would be low.
“Literally a month ago, we at Bellona published a report in which we analyzed in detail what benefit Rosatom would get from relaunching the station,” he said. “We calculated that it would make no sense for them to start up more than one reactor because there would be nowhere for the energy to go: there’s no energy grid to send it further than the occupied territories, and energy consumption in the occupied territories is not very high.”
Meanwhile, he added, if anything goes wrong with the reactor that’s brought online, “the entire station will be paralyzed.”
The cooling tower fire
While it’s difficult to determine exactly what caused the fire at the Zaporizhzhia NPP cooling tower earlier this week, Gorchakov believes it was likely sparked by a Ukrainian drone attack.
“We know from satellite images that there are military trenches right next to [the tower],” he explained. “We also know that there are Russian military positions right next to the cooling pond.”
Because these facilities are far from the area where the IAEA’s permanent mission is based, the Russian army is “much less hesitant to station troops there,” Gorchakov said, though he added that the watchdog group’s presence hasn’t stopped Russia from posting soldiers in more sensitive parts of the plant, either.
“We see that Russian troops and armored vehicles are stationed on the premises of the Zaporizhzhia NPP. There are pictures [confirming] that they’re directly inside the reactor buildings,” he said. “They’re hiding their equipment there, of course, because they know that [Ukraine] won’t fire at these facilities.”
At the same time, Gorchakov said, by putting troops and equipment there, Russia is effectively making the NPP into a military target. “It’s sheer madness for anyone to attack or capture nuclear facilities,” he said. “But if it’s unavoidable, then under no circumstances should the site be taken by force or shot at from tanks and heavy weaponry, like what happened in 2022, when Russia captured the Zaporizhzhia NPP. [Instead,] the station should be surrounded and negotiated over.”
Worst-case scenarios
The Zaporizhzhia NPP has been occupied for more than two years, but it’s so far avoided a major nuclear disaster. “There have been cases of shells hitting the NPP’s [grounds] , but they’ve either missed the facilities themselves or they’ve only damaged infrastructure that’s not important for nuclear safety,” Gorchakov said. “But if something hit one of the reactor buildings, for example, what would happen next is a huge question.
Reactor units are the most heavily protected part of every nuclear plant, Gorchakov noted. “At the Zaporizhzhia NPP, for example, the reactors are surrounded by special concrete shells,” he said. “But who knows how well these would be able to withstand a strike from a modern weapon.”
Meanwhile, Russia’s Kursk Nuclear Power Plant, which is not in shutdown and has recently found itself within a few dozen miles of Ukraine’s ongoing cross-border incursion, has no concrete shells around its reactors. “There is, of course, a concrete roof over the reactor unit, but it was designed for civilian safety needs [only],” Gorchakov said.
According to him, if the roof of the Kursk NPP’s reactor unit is pierced and one of the operating reactors subsequently gets hit, radiation would spread dozens of kilometers. “The scale would hardly be comparable to Chernobyl, because that disaster was the result of an explosion inside of a reactor, which caused the radiation to spread much further,” he explained. “But the consequences would be dire nonetheless.”
Another major risk would be if key equipment like the station’s cooling system or its external power supply system were damaged. “Then we could see the Fukushima scenario, where a reactor has been put into shutdown, but the fuel for it still needs to be cooled, and the cooling system has been damaged,” Gorchako said. “Ultimately, [in Fukushima,] the fuel started to melt, resulting in a hydrogen explosion that led to emissions into the atmosphere.” The best way to minimize this risk, the expert said, is to keep the reactors in shutdown while leaving the cooling systems intact.
Interview by Meduza. English-language summary by Sam Breazeale.