UN team will visit Ukraine’s threatened nuclear plant

UNITED Nations experts are expected to visit the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant next week, Ukrainian officials said yesterday.

Fire damage to a transmission line at Europe’s largest nuclear plant caused a blackout across the region on Thursday and heightened fears of a catastrophe in a country still haunted by the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.

Lana Zerkal, an adviser to Ukraine’s energy minister, said logistical issues were being worked out for the UN International Atomic Energy Agency team to head to Zaporizhzhia.

The site has been occupied by Russian forces and run by Ukrainian workers since the early days of the invasion. Ukraine has accused Russia of trying to sabotage the visit and essentially holding the plant hostage,

‘Recklessly firing on the facility’

storing weapons there and launching attacks from around it.

Moscow accuses Ukraine of recklessly firing on the facility.

‘Despite the fact that the Russians agreed for the mission to travel through the territory of Ukraine, they are now artificially creating all the conditions for the mission not to reach the facility,’ Miss Zerkal said.

The atomic agency’s head, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said he hoped to send a team to the plant within days. Negotiations over how the experts would gain access are complicated but advancing, he added.

Ukrainian officials said an area close to the plant came under a barrage of shelling yesterday morning. Its emergency generators were used to keep it working when it was cut off from the grid earlier in the week. That led Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to accuse Russia of nearly causing a ‘radiation disaster’.

Russia blamed the transmissionline damage on a Ukrainian attack.

Kyiv cannot shut down the country’s nuclear reactors because its four stations provide half its electricity.