The Russian forces took on Thursday, February 24, the control of the plant, including the explosion of reactor No. 4, in 1986, had led to an unprecedented nuclear disaster. The Ukrainian energy sector is a major challenge of the Moscow offensive.
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The fights carried out around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in Ukraine, have been feared the worst. Thursday, February 24, in the evening, the Bureau of the Ukrainian Presidency noted: “After a fierce battle, we lost control of Chernobyl.” The name of the plant, whose reactor n ° 4 exploded on 26 April 1986, returns dramatically in the news. While the fighting was raging around the site, located in the north of the country, near the Belarusian border, from which the Russian troops came from, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, mentioned, in a message on Telegram, the ” defenders who gave their lives so that the tragedy of 1986 does not repeat “. “It’s a declaration of war against the entire Europe,” he added.
Friday, the catastrophe envisaged did not take place. And the eventuality, pointed by Mr. Zelensky, an artillery shot on the facilities leaving radioactive dusts that “would cover Ukraine, Belarus and the countries of the European Union” did not verify . However, the situation remains worrying.
First, in the vicinity of Chernobyl, radioactivity rates have risen sharply. The Ukrainian nuclear safety authority has indicated on Friday morning that these levels, measured by many tags scattered in the region, had increased, “without being possible to establish the reasons for these changes because of the fighting on the territory “. The advanced hypothesis is that the movement of heavy military machinery stimulated the soil, contaminated, causing an increase in air pollution.
Radioactive dust
eric COGEZ, head of the radiological intervention and environmental surveillance service at the Institute for Radiationrotection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN), believes that the increase factor observed on certain tags goes from ten to forty . Without reaching dangerous levels: “radioactivity is identical to the one to which we are exposed in a line airliner”, knowing that at 10,000 meters above sea level, the radiation is 100 to 300 times higher than that found. on the ground. This radioactive dust should redeem quickly. “But the situation remains difficult to analyze,” he warns, because we see points go to red everywhere, without any coherence. “
Other risk, if the concrete sarcophagus and the immense metal arch that confines everything – it was built in 2017 to prevent the radioactivity from escaping during decontamination and dismantling operations – have Subjected no damage, there remains the pool, which contains some 20,000 fuel assemblies, which were used to feed the plant between 1977 and 2000, the year of the final stop of the other three Chernobyl reactors. “If we lose electrical sources, and therefore the cooling of this pool, there is no risk of denomination of the assemblies. In case of loss of the electricity grid on the power plants, the emergency generators would feed the systems. security of the reactors “, observes Karine Herviou, Assistant Director General of the IRSN.
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