The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has warned about the ongoing risk of a nuclear accident in Ukraine, saying the "dangers to nuclear safety continue to be very real and ever-present."
The presence of IAEA officials at nuclear facilities in Ukraine remains essential to help prevent a nuclear incident, Raphael Grossi said on June 3 after his 12th visit to Kyiv since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The IAEA has played a role in safeguarding the condition of Ukraine's nuclear power plants since then.
It regularly sends expert teams to the operating reactor sites in Rivne and Khmelnytskiy and has a permanent presence at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, which has been shut down for safety reasons.
The IAEA experts at Rivne and Khmelnytskiy had to take shelter up to three times during Grossi's visit because of an unusually high number of air raid warnings.
"My teams report that this was the most intense day of air raid alarms they had experienced since late last year," Grossi said in a news release.
Grossi said he met with Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko and other senior officials in the basement of the Energy Ministry because of an active air alarm in Kyiv.
He also met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha and discussed the IAEA's plans to support the country in restoring and expanding its nuclear power infrastructure.
Grossi also commented on a report that Russia is taking steps to connect the power plant to its electricity grid, telling Reuters in an interview that the Russians had never hidden the fact they want to restart the plant but added they would not be able to do so soon.
He said the plant is not in a condition to be restarted at present due to a lack of water for cooling and the absence of a stable power supply. Water would have to be pumped from the Dnipro River for the plant to restart, Grossi said.
Greenpeace issued a report last week saying Russia was building a 90-kilometer high-voltage power line to connect the power plant to Russia's grid.
Grossi said the IAEA did not agree with that report's conclusions.
"There are some areas where there has been some work, but we do not have any concrete evidence that this is part of a concerted, orchestrated plan to connect the power plant in one sense or the other," he said.
"We are not in a situation of imminent restart of the plant. Far from that, it would take quite some time before that can be done."
Zelenskyy said on X that any Russian efforts to restart the Zaporizhzhya power plant without Ukraine's involvement would be "absurd and dangerous," adding that is the reason IAEA officials "must be at the plant without artificial obstacles to their work or staff rotation." The experts at the plant "are showing the real situation to the world," he said.
The facility is Europe's largest nuclear power plant. Before the war it generated a fifth of Ukraine's electricity. The last of its six reactors stopped generating electricity in September 2022. It has been occupied by Russia since shortly after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Areas near the plant regularly come under artillery and drone bombardment, which has damaged the two remaining power lines supplying the electricity needed for the plant to cool itself.
Both sides accuse each other of being responsible for the attacks.
