Zaporizhzhia: What would happen if there was an accident?

Zaporizhzhia: What would happen if there was an accident?

Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia power plant is Europe’s largest nuclear facility. It’s also central to Russia’s war. Experts say a meltdown would spell disaster.

This article was originally published on November 8, 2022. It was last updated on May 8, 2023, to reflect developments in the Russia-Ukraine war and renewed concern over the stability of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. It is the first of two articles on the threats posed by nuclear technology and weapons in the war.

More than a year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant remains a central target in the ongoing war. Russia has controlled the plant since March 2022 and the area has come under repeated attacks.
On May 7, 2023, it was reported that more than 1,500 people had been evacuated on Russian orders —including 600 or more children — from 18 towns and settlements around the atomic energy facility.  
Rafael Grossi, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that the “general situation in the area near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is becoming increasingly unpredictable and potentially dangerous."
Two months earlier, in March 2023, missile strikes had caused outages and left the plant running on emergency diesel generators. That backup power supply was vital for cooling reactor fuel at the plant and preventing a nuclear meltdown, which would release dangerous thermal energy and radiation into the atmosphere.

Nuclear poses two threats in the Russia-Ukraine war

When people think about nuclear threats and the war in Ukraine, most consider two possibilities: What would happen if an accident occurred at a Ukrainian nuclear plant? And what would happen if a nuclear weapon were deployed?
For this article, we talked to experts about the health impact the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters had on surrounding populations, and asked them to explain the degree to which those disasters might provide a framework for our current understanding of risk at Zaporizhzhia.
In the next article in this series, we explain the health effects linked to the detonation of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and also look at what could happen if nuclear weapons were detonated in today's world.

Zaporizhzhia under occupation

Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia power plant is located close to the country's southern border. With six reactors on site, Zaporizhzhia is Europe's largest nuclear power plant. In 2022, it became the first active nuclear plant in history to continue operations in the midst of a war.
When occupying forces seized the plant in March 2022, experts tried to weigh up how a potential accident there would compare with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster — an event that for decades marked the worst nuclear power accident in history. The Chernobyl meltdown released radiation across Europe, affecting the lives of humans, plants and animals throughout the region.
Over 30 plant workers died in the three months following the disaster at the Soviet power station, Chernobyl, as a direct result of the meltdown.
A report
published by the Chernobyl Forum, a group of UN agencies formed in 2003 to assess the health and environmental consequences of the accident, suggested in 2006 that it will cause at least 4,000 cancer deaths in the long term, although that estimate is contested.

Did Soviet officials try to downplay the aftermath of Chernobyl?

Some experts say the impact of the disaster was concealed by Soviet officials in an attempt to downplay its severity. One of them is Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Kate Brown.
Brown has conducted extensive research on the impact radiation has had on people's health in Ukraine and surrounding countries since the 1986 accident.

In a Greenpeace report published in 2006, researchers estimated the predicted death toll at around 90,000 — nearly 23 times the number suggested by the Chernobyl Forum report.
Edwin Lyman, a physicist and director of Nuclear Power Safety with the US-based Union of Concerned Scientists, said he, "doesn't consider the Chernobyl Forum report to be authoritative."
Lyman said the Forum's report based its cancer death predictions only on cases within the former Soviet Union, ignoring exposure to populations in other parts of Europe and the northern hemisphere. The original Chernobyl health impact report conducted by UN agencies and published in 1988, did address the global exposure to radiation in response to the accident, and estimated it would ultimately correspond to 30,000 or more cancer deaths, Lyman said.
"The fundamental issue is whether one believes that low-level exposures will cause cancer or not — and the worldwide expert consensus is that they do. The Chernobyl Forum essentially assumed otherwise," he said, calling the study a "highly political document with conclusions that were carefully massaged to minimize the impacts of the accident."