IAEA Director General: restart of Zaporizhzhya NPP is impossible now
Grossi met with the head of Rosatom in Kaliningrad
The restart of Zaporizhzhya NPP and the resumption of generation at the plant is currently impossible, according to Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
‘We discussed the possibility of restarting the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, which is now by all accounts impossible,’ Grossi said after talks in Kaliningrad with Rosatom CEO Alexei Likhachev, BBC reports.
Grossi called for conditions to be created to prevent any nuclear incident due to external influence.
‘These circumstances do not allow us to talk about restarting ZNPP now. However, this does not prevent us from discussing how we can further establish such a restart when such conditions are met,’ Grossi told reporters.
Russian troops seized ZNPP shortly after the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Zaporizhzhia NPP has not been generating electricity since then, but it needs a constant supply of electricity to cool one of its reactors, which is not completely disconnected from the grid.
The plant is subject to constant drone attacks. The IAEA has previously declared a ‘serious deterioration in the nuclear safety situation at ZNPP’ due to the attacks, which Grossi called irresponsible and dangerous.
Likhachev agreed with the IAEA chief that ZNPP cannot be restarted now, but called the plant's technical condition absolutely safe.
‘We assess the current state, the technical condition, the state related to personnel at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant as absolutely safe,’ the head of Rosatom said.
Background. At the same time, Energoatom CEO Petro Kotin said that six ZNPP units are approaching a dangerous point: the fuel is reaching the end of its service life. Some of the fuel at ZNPP has been in operation for more than 6 years, which is the limit.
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