(Bloomberg) -- International nuclear monitors are preparing to return to the stricken Chernobyl nuclear power plant -- site of the deadly 1986 meltdown -- as soon as Russian troops complete their withdrawal and Ukrainian operators take back control. 

International Atomic Energy Agency monitors will be on the ground “very soon,” Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said at a press briefing in Vienna. The Argentine diplomat returned Friday from a week-long trip to Ukraine and Russia, where he worked out separate deals to boost the safety and security of nuclear sites amid a military conflict now in its second month.

“This is undoubtedly a step in the right direction,” Grossi said of the Russia withdrawal from Chernobyl. “The plant has to be operated by its own natural operators.”

In the absence of international oversight, a war of words has erupted between Ukrainian and Russian nuclear-safety officials over radiation risks at Chernobyl. Russians who began leaving the plant got “significant doses” of radiation from digging trenches at the highly contaminated site, Ukraine’s state power company said Friday. Moscow’s IAEA envoy reported Thursday that Ukraine workers at the plant sabotaged transmission lines used to monitor radiation safety. 

Grossi said that radiation levels around the plant were normal and that the IAEA hasn’t seen any evidence that Russian troops received dangerous doses. Heavy vehicles kicking up dust as they exit could temporarily trigger higher measurements, as they did when Russia troops first arrived in February, he said. 


The 2,600 square kilometer (1,000 square mile) Chernobyl exclusion zone contains long-lived radioactive material that will take thousands of years to decay. It also houses a nuclear-waste facility, where spent fuel from Ukraine’s reactors is encased for safe, long-term storage. 

Nuclear authorities have been warning for weeks that the relative risks at Chernobyl are low -- compared to the dangers of bullets, bombs and the threats to functioning nuclear power plants -- but that the site of the deadly accident continues to stoke a visceral reaction among people. Russia’s retreat from the site provides new ammunition in the information war that’s run parallel to the armed conflict now in its second month. 

“It has been a bit laborious for us to establish facts,” Grossi said. “If our people are there, it goes much faster.”

The more immediate radiation concerns in Ukraine are located at the country’s 15 other reactors which are operating in a war zone. Vadim Chumak, head of the external exposure dosimetry lab at Ukraine’s National Research Center for Radiation Medicine, told MIT Technology Review this week that he’s more concerned by the risk posed by Russia’s occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in the southeast of the country.

“In Zaporizhzhia they have six reactors, plus spent fuel storage,” he said. “If there was any damage to the spent fuel assemblies stored at Zaporizhzhia, it could result in an enormous radiological emergency, comparable to what happened in Chernobyl.”  

The IAEA’s agreement with Ukraine and Russia includes a “rapid assistance mechanism” that could be triggered in the event of an accident and will allow monitors on site to “assess and assist almost immediately.” The agency will also deliver personal-protection gear, radiation-detection equipment to authorities, Grossi said. 

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.


Ukraine crisis: Reports of poisoning among Russians


Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby casts doubt on the reports that Russian

soldiers had suffered radiation  sickness

Victoria Kim   |   Published 02.04.22

As Russian troops pulled out of Ukraine’s shuttered Chernobyl nuclear plant five weeks after seizing it, an international nuclear watchdog agency is looking into reports that some of the soldiers are experiencing radiation poisoning.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director general, was scheduled to speak at a news conference afternoon at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna after meeting with senior government officials from Ukraine and Russia.

Russian troops left the plant and the nearby city of Slavutych on Thursday, according to Energoatom, Ukraine’s state-run energy company. Three convoys of soldiers who left the site were headed north toward Belarus, the IAEA said in a statement.

The agency said it was working to confirm local news media reports that Russian soldiers were leaving the site because some had been exposed to high levels of radiation there.

The agency also said it would send experts and safety and security supplies to Ukraine to ensure safety at Chernobyl, where the worst nuclear disaster in history occurred in 1986.

A Pentagon spokesman, John F. Kirby, cast doubt on the reports that Russian soliders had suffered radiation sickness, saying in a news conference on Thursday that “at this early stage” the troop movement appeared to be “a piece of this larger effort to refit and resupply and not necessarily done because of health hazards or some sort of emergency or a crisis at Chernobyl”.

Russia seized the decommissioned plant early in its invasion of Ukraine, raisingconcerns about radiation levels and safeguarding at the site, where spent fuel still requires round-the-clock maintenance.

Some Russian troops were still in the “exclusion zone” around the Chernobyl nuclear power station on Friday morning, a day after ending their occupation of the plant itself, a Ukrainian official said.

(New York Times News Service)


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