Five technicians secured by threads worked near the curved summit of an arched steel structure which occupied the equivalent of 40 floors high, trying to extinguish the last insulation pieces which incubates by a drone strike. It’s snowing; The temperature was lower than the frost; The steel was covered with ice.
The strike hole was large enough, about 540 square feet, and dangerous for many reasons – mainly because it compromised the safety of the protective shell covering the n ° 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the site of the worst nuclear history disaster.
The violation was also deliberate, said Ukrainian officials, struck at 1:59 am on Friday by a Russian drone with a highly explosive warhead. Nuclear experts called it one of the most potentially dangerous attacks since Russia invaded Ukraine almost three years ago.
Despite the strike, the levels of influence in Chernobyl remained normal on Friday. Well below this arched hood, the “sarcophagus” in concrete and steel holding the reactor and the highly radioactive debris kept. No one was injured or killed.
However, the Ukrainian authorities have described the strike as daring, hitting a nuclear power plant on the eve of a rally of world leaders in Munich and risking a disaster.
The Kremlin denied that the Russian army had struck the plant. His spokesperson, Dmitri S. Peskov, suggested that the violation was a kind of fraud of the Ukrainians. “The Russian army is not doing this,” he said.
The workers turned off the fire early on Friday, but the insulation was still burned in the late afternoon, said Andriy Danyk, head of the Ukraine State Emergency Service, while he held in the median of a parking lot in front of the reactor n ° 4. But the hole will take months to repair, he added, and it is not yet clear all the work that must be done so that it be sealed.
“You have an incredible and terrible situation, because it is not supposed to occur,” said Shaun Burnie, specialist in the main nuclear in Greenpeace who has monitored nuclear power plants in Ukraine since 2022 and who visited Chernobyl on Friday. “It has never been designed for a deliberate military attack. We have investigated Russian war crimes, and it looks like another. »»
On Friday, Ukrainian officials showed pieces of journalists from the drone they say they hit the factory – a Shahed, generally deployed by Russia and stamped with the 15480 code. They displayed it near a sign D ‘Radioactivity alert, as if to prove the severity of the attack on the attack.
A first analysis by McKenzie Intelligence Services, a British consulting company, which was ordered Friday by Greenpeace, said that video sequences have shown internal minor damage to installation. The analysis also indicated that the drone engine debris “is almost certainly” the remains of a piston engine that feeds the Shahed drone, provided by Iran with the Russians.
The analysis also indicated that the drone system is guided by predefined coordinates for a planned target. “This would indicate the almost deliberate targeting” of the plant by the Russians, added the analysis.
President Volodymyr Zelensky, from Ukraine, told Munich Security Conference journalists in Germany that the drone was flying at an altitude of around 278 feet, which is undetectable by radar.
“It was not a case of change of drone or something like that,” said Zelensky.
The damaged $ 1.7 billion protective shell was Finished in 2019Built with the help of 45 countries to ensure that a nuclear accident like the one that occurred in 1986 would not happen here.
The structure was an engineering feat, designed to seal in large quantities of radioactive isotopes of the fire and the merger in 1986 in the reactor n ° 4. The sarcophagus built in haste deteriorated, but the vaulted steel shell was intended to last generations. It was brought on railroad tracks, said Burnie, and around 40,000 tonnes, is the largest mobile structure ever built.
Apart from the entry control point for Chernobyl, a yellow sign announces the “major construction” program of Mr. Zelensky, proclaiming “Chernobyl – from the exclusion zone to the Renaissance zone”.
More than a catastrophic area, a large part of the Chernobyl exclusion zone of 1,000 square miles, where access is strictly limited, resembles a forest of stories, with snow -capped pines and small villages. But the houses are abandoned; Most are marked with panels saying how many people lived there.
Friday, the military and police control points stopped the cars every few kilometers. A convoy of military trucks moved to the plant. Two firefighters went to the exit.
In the plant itself, an unfinished reactor looked like an abandoned giant erectors. A display panel near reactor No. 4 has depicted a large fire and urged people to call Ukraine’s emergency number 101 in the event of a disaster.
Snow has made a lot of things in the factory. The fire trucks were parked in the field near reactor n ° 4. Mr. Danyk said that snow and frozen surfaces made the urgency much more dangerous, but the workers hoped to extinguish the insulation by Friday evening.
He added that the Ukrainian hydrometeorological center was monitoring the levels of radiation nationwide. They remained normal.
“Our team is constantly running to ensure that no one is exposed to radiation,” he said.
Oleksandr Tytarchuk, the chief engineer of the factory, said that his team and other specialists planned to make a “preliminary analysis and temporarily seal the opening”, to prevent more humidity from entering the structure, which can speed up corrosion. But it would not be a joint to the test of radiation, which means that the shell would no longer serve the function it had before the strike.
“We understand that the snow falls, the rain is expected and that the water used during the abolition of fires has also become radioactive waste,” said Tytarchuk. “That said, I must emphasize that the radiation levels have not increased and stay under control.”
Workers will then have to find a more permanent solution – a solution that did not seem obvious on Friday afternoon.
Oleksandra Mykolyshyn Contributed reports.
