Energy

[I]f the Russians are not restrained in causing a major humanitarian and ecological disaster by blowing up a dam — as Ukrainian and Western leaders contend and is a war crime under the Geneva Convention — what else are they capable of? Would they cause a similar or worse calamity if the Ukrainian counteroffensive forces them to retreat from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant? After all, the Russian military reportedly mined the perimeter of the plant where tons of nuclear material is stored.

As the international community ponders these prospects, the ghost of the Chernobyl catastrophe, the world’s worst nuclear accident that in 1986 covered swaths of Ukraine and Europe in radioactive fallout, returns to haunt. The parallels are uncanny: Chernobyl, the Kakhovka dam destruction, and the potential disaster at Zaporizhzhia all expose the lies of the governments in Moscow and their callous indifference toward massive and needless human suffering.

Rosatom has had a terrible record in Ukraine, including the annexation and illegal occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine. The United Kingdom and the United States have applied some sanctions on Rosatom-connected entities, targeting members of company leadership, the sham Zaporizhzhia joint-stock company, and some Russian nuclear research centers. But several European countries are dependent—some entirely—on Rosatom’s products to support their nuclear power plants and energy security profiles. Some European utilities have demonstrated great urgency to develop alternative suppliers to Rosatom, the Russian global company that has largely maintained its dealings in nuclear fuel and construction of new reactors across the European market.

By many measures, Russia’s state-controlled nuclear energy company, Rosatom, has primacy in the global nuclear energy market. At any given moment, the firm provides technical expertise, enriched fuel, and equipment to nuclear reactors around the world. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and, more acutely, the Russian military’s dangerous actions at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and in the Chernobyl exclusion zone have many countries rethinking their dependence on Russian nuclear products and searching for alternatives. Additionally, the ensuing global effort to cripple Russian access to international markets calls into question the viability of current contracts, government licensing, and financial instruments involved in Russia’s nuclear exports.

For a night on March 3, Russian military forces seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, damaged its infrastructure, and spread fear of a nuclear catastrophe. Fortunately, the attack did not threaten sensitive areas of the nuclear power plant, and radiation levels around the plant did not raise concern. Still, the crisis underscored the danger posed by a war that crosses paths with a nuclear power plant. Since this may be a case of when, not if, the next wartime attack on a nuclear power plant happens, scholars and policymakers would be wise to revisit concepts for assessing and protocols for responding to nuclear power plant crises in war zones. 

As the battle for Ukraine enters its third week, the specter of Chernobyl, site of world's worst nuclear accident, returns to haunt us. A few hours after the Russian invasion started, early on Feb. 24, the Russian military occupied the Chernobyl exclusion zone, some 30 kilometers in radius, that houses the decommissioned power plant, nuclear fuel storage, and nuclear waste facilities. On March 9, Ukraine's nuclear regulator informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that the Chernobyl power plant lost electricity and that the safe operation of the plant's cooling system was in danger.

Concerns are mounting about the safety of Ukraine’s 15 nuclear reactors and the possibility of an ecological disaster in the midst of the Russian invasion.

“There are contingencies but I doubt that these power plants have prepared for a full-scale invasion,” said Mariana Budjeryn, a Ukrainian research associate with Harvard University’s project on managing the atom. “In the middle of a large scale conflict, there’s a myriad of things that could happen, for which normal, even very robust, safety procedures at a nuclear power plant [would be insufficient].”

To ensure that the world has reliable access to the neutrons it needs, at the lowest possible cost, and to facilitate further efforts to minimize and eventually eliminate civilian use of highly enriched uranium, we need an international mechanism to anticipate worldwide neutron needs and plan how to meet them. In essence, the 2016 National Academies’ report recommendation (which sadly remains unfulfilled even in the United States) should be internationalized.

Nuclear reactors remain a technology whose risks and benefits, potential and real, are inequitably distributed in society, temporally and geographically. The fuel that powers reactors comes from mines that have poisoned Indigenous communities and Global South nations for decades. The connection between a nation’s nuclear energy capability and its possession of nuclear weapons, though once direct and now more attenuated, nevertheless persists. And finally there are the environmental footprints of the nuclear era: its wastes. Though often described by nuclear engineers as a technically solved problem, the disposition of nuclear waste remains unresolved in most countries (Finland and Sweden are exceptions), its fate an ongoing open question, particularly in the United States. However this question may eventually be answered, nuclear waste will perhaps be the most enduring vestige of the Anthropocene.

When accidents, particularly nuclear accidents, occur, there is a desire, even an imperative almost, to identify the ‘root causes’ of that particular accident. This is not entirely surprising because such accidents cause existential crises sector-wide or industry-wide that reflect the desire to never repeat the mistakes that led to such a severe outcome. However, identifying the root causes of an accident is seldom possible. The causes of an accident are typically large in number and complex in relationship to each other.

Chernobyl still stands for the world’s worst nuclear accident. The full impact of a nuclear disaster on this scale is difficult to compute, not least because the effects that count most are often those that are most difficult to count. Beyond the number of lives lost and people displaced, beyond the money spent on accident mitigation and remediation, there are long-term health, environmental, social, economic, and political consequences that defy quantification. Thirty-five years on, we are still grappling with the full extent of Chernobyl’s impact on the world. Yet in a very real sense, we live in a world shaped by Chernobyl.