(Bloomberg) — The United Nations nuclear watchdog is widening its oversight in Ukraine to include high-voltage power networks critical to maintaining safety at atomic plants that generate the bulk of the country’s electricity.
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The International Atomic Energy Agency’s decision followed a meeting between Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi on Tuesday in Kyiv. It also comes as Russia intensifies its attacks, including a massive assault last week on energy infrastructure.
Earlier this week, the supervisory board of grid operator Ukrenergo removed the company’s chief executive, following a report about the protection of high-voltage facilities from Russian strikes.
Read: Two Ukrenergo Supervisory Board Members Quit Over CEO Ouster
Zelenskiy’s government asked whether the IAEA could also look at “critical substations in the country that have been subject to pressure or attacks, in the sense that they are also linked to the nuclear power plants,” Grossi told reporters. “We think this is relevant and we are going to be making an evaluation of the situation in some of these substations.”
Unlike other power sources like coal, gas or renewables, nuclear plants require a constant flow of electricity to keep safety-control systems operational. Without this supply, fuel inside of a reactor’s core risks overheating, raising the specter of a meltdown.
Russia has escalated its attacks on Ukraine’s power grid in recent months, with key thermal-generation plants and transmission nodes disabled. Those strikes have had a knock-on effect at the three nuclear plants still under Ukrainian control west of the Dnieper River.
“The heightened vulnerability of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is deeply concerning for nuclear safety at Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, as we saw last week when several reactors stopped operating because of damage to the energy infrastructure elsewhere in the country,” Grossi said in a separate statement late Tuesday.
While in Ukraine, Grossi said he’ll leading an IAEA monitoring team across the battle line to visit the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
–With assistance from Olesia Safronova.
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