|HT|
As the Chernobyl nuclear power plant entirely went off the grid on Wednesday amid the Russia-Ukraine fight triggering fresh concerns for the world as Ukraine said the power outage could put systems for cooling nuclear material at risk. The cause of the power disruption was not immediately clear. The site of the world's worst nuclear disaster was captured by the Russian forces before Ukrainian soldiers took the control of it and then again it was reportedly captured by the Russian troops. Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba called for a ceasefire so that the Ukrainian government can repair the electricity line. "Reserve diesel generators have a 48-hour capacity to power the Chornobyl NPP. After that, cooling systems of the storage facility for spent nuclear fuel will stop, making radiation leaks imminent," he said on Twitter.
As of now, emergency generators are supplying backup power to the plant.
The diesel generator has fuel for 48 hours and unless the electricity is restored within 48 hours, the parameters of nuclear and radiation safety can not be controlled, Ukrainian grid operator Ukrenerho said.
Ukraine’s state-run nuclear company Energoatom said there were about 20,000 spent fuel assemblies at Chernobyl that could not be kept cool amid a power outage. Why is this dangerous? Energoatom said the warming could lead to the release of radioactive substances into the environment. "The radioactive cloud could be carried by wind to other regions of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and Europe," it said in a statement," it said.
On Tuesday, the UN nuclear watchdog warned that the systems monitoring nuclear material at the radioactive waste facilities at Chernobyl had stopped transmitting data.
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