The last operating reactor at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine has been completely shut down and disconnected from the grid, the Ukrainian operator Energoatom said on Sunday.
“Arrangements for its cooling and transfer to a cold state are underway,” Energoatom said, adding that in recent days the sixth — and last operating — reactor at the plant had been powering exclusively the facility’s in-house needs because “all transmission lines linking the Zaporizhzhya NPP to the Ukrainian power system were damaged due to Russian shelling.”
The U.N. nuclear watchdog had warned on Friday that this could happen following renewed shelling around the nuclear facility — the largest in Europe. Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that it was an “absolute imperative” to create “a nuclear safety and security protection zone” around the site, stressing that a nuclear power plant “can never be a pawn of war.”
The facility was seized by Russian forces in March but has continued to be operated by Ukrainian staff.
Energoatom said that the plant’s in-house needs “will be powered by diesel generators, the service life of which is limited by the technological resource and the amount of available diesel fuel.” The operator added that it is taking “all possible measures to organize the supply of additional batches of diesel fuel” to the facility.
“In order to prevent an emergency situation at the power plant, it is necessary to stop the Russian shelling of the transmission lines linking the ZNNP to the power system and establish a demilitarized zone around it,” Energoatom said.