The Russian government has confirmed this Friday that it has taken control of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as part of the offensive launched on Thursday in Ukraine and has highlighted that the level of radiation in the area is within normal parameters.
The spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense, Igor Konashenkov, stressed that “the joint actions of Russian air landing troops and Ukrainians from the battalion guarding the nuclear power plant are guarantees that nationalist groups or other terrorist organizations will not be able to take advantage of the situation ( …) to carry out a nuclear provocation,” according to the Russian news agency Sputnik.
However, the Ukrainian authorities have pointed to a “significant” increase in radiation levels in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, although they have noted that for now it is not possible to determine the reasons for the changes due to the fighting in the zone.
“The data from the automatic monitoring system of the exclusion zone, available online, show that the levels of gamma radiation control have increased significantly,” said the State Inspector for Nuclear Regulation in his account on the social network Facebook .
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called on Thursday for “maximum restraint” to avoid any damage to the country’s nuclear facilities, such as Chernobyl, whose plant has been taken over by the Russian Armed Forces as part of its offensive. .
The Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelensky, stressed during the clashes in the area that “it is a declaration of war against all of Europe” and said that the Ukrainian troops “are giving their lives so that the tragedy of 1986 is not repeated.”
On the other hand, Konashenkov has stated that more than 150 Ukrainian soldiers have laid down their arms and have surrendered in the framework of military operations in the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, whose independence was recently recognized by Moscow.
“During the fighting, more than 150 members of Ukraine’s various security forces laid down their arms and surrendered. Currently, they are required to sign an oath refusing to take part in hostilities. Soon they will be able to meet with their relatives”, has settled.
A sarcophagus weighing 30,000 tons, financed by the European Union, protects reactor number 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which, according to the president of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenski, the Russian Armed Forces are subjecting to an offensive to gain control of the plant located in the north of the country.
The Chernobyl power plant suffered on April 26, 1986 the biggest accident in the history of nuclear energy after registering the explosion of the reactor. The enclave was part of the former Soviet Union (USSR), to which Ukraine belonged, and the Kremlin tried to silence the event for weeks. This Wednesday Russia has launched an offensive in the Central European country and the nuclear power plant is once again at the epicenter of the news.
“The Russian occupation forces are trying to capture the Chernobyl power plant,” Ukraine’s president, Volodimir Zelenski, who has confirmed fighting in this area, has denounced on Twitter, without going into details.
Thus, he has said that the Ukrainian troops “are giving their lives so that the tragedy of 1986 is not repeated.” Zelenski has underlined that “it is a declaration of war against the whole of Europe”.
After the accident, an exclusion zone with a radius of 30 kilometers was decreed around the plant, located about 4 kilometers from the city of Pripyat, 18 kilometers from the city of Chernobyl and just over 17 kilometers from the border of Belarus.
A day and a half after the accident, the entire population of Pripyat, 49,360 people, was evacuated, but during the following weeks and months, a total of 67,000 more people were evacuated from contaminated areas and were evicted by order of the Government of the USSR . Finally, the IAEA estimates that up to 200,000 people were relocated as a result of the accident.
Due to the nuclear accident, explosions were generated that caused the reactor 4 lid to blow up and large amounts of radioactive material were released into the atmosphere from the core. The radioactive cloud spread throughout Europe and reached North America, according to data from the International Atomic Energy Organization (IAEA).
For years negotiations were carried out with the Government of Ukraine to definitively close the facility and the last of its reactors was stopped in December 2000. Forty countries of the international community promised to gather the funds to build a protection barrier in the reactor. Specifically, the bulk of the financing for the project, whose cost reached 2,100 million euros, was raised by the Chernobyl Protection Fund of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
The one known as the New Chernobyl Security Sarcophagus (NSC) weighs more than 30,000 tons in the form of a vault that still retains a great deal of radiation. It was officially delivered by the European Union to Ukraine last July 2019 after 12 years of construction through a consortium of companies.
The structure that protects Chernobyl is 108 meters high, 162 meters long and 257 meters wide and its foundation rests on a volume of 20,000 cubic meters of concrete and has been designed to prevent radiation leakage for at least 100 more years. Its mission will be to provide a definitive solution to the more than 100 tons of uranium and other radioactive materials that the accident released.
The vault is covered by specially resistant steel panels and inside it hides a twelve meter thick air chamber that incorporates a sophisticated ventilation system that minimizes the risk of corrosion, maintains the relative humidity of the installation at around 40 percent and allows to recirculate about 45,000 cubic meters of air per hour.
The vault is long enough to house two Boeing 747s or the Statue of Liberty and has the capacity to withstand a magnitude 6 earthquake, a category 3 tornado, winds of 155 to 200 mph (254 to 332 km/h) and extreme temperatures that They range from -43ºC to +45ºC.