kyiv, ukraine —
Russia is turning the occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant into a military base, according Petro Kotin, president of Ukraine's state-run nuclear company, Energoatom. The number of Russian military personnel at the nuclear plant now exceeds the number of personnel, he said.
The security personnel who recently worked at the plant told VOA that if a disaster at the station happened, it could not only contaminate half of Ukraine and the Black Sea but also gravely affect Europe as well.
Myroslava Gongadze, VOA’s Eastern Europe bureau chief, discussed the situation with Kotin on Thursday in Kyiv. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity:
You were Zaporizhzhia nuclear station director for a long time, and you know the facility as well as anyone. Could you please give us an assessment of what is going on there today?
The situation is worsening all the time, starting right from the beginning of the occupation, which was on March 4th last year when [Russian forces] ... captured the plant and installed their own regime, with soldiers making all the decisions about management on site. Our staff is still there. And then [Russian President Vladimir] Putin issued a decree creating a fake operational organization, which was based on Rosatom [Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy monopoly], responsible for Russia's nuclear power plant operations. They pressured the personnel, our staff, to just sign the contracts with this fake Rosatom organization. There was torture, there was some beating of personnel. They also captured the staff and put them in cages. They had all types of torture in there. Some people were killed, and some people are missing. And we do not know where they are at the moment. And actually, this push on the personnel was always increasing during this time. And right now we know that about 2,000 to 2,700 of our staff signed this contract with [this fake organization], and we stopped our contracts with them. But still, in Enerhodar, [a town very close to the plant], we have about 6,500 people who are members of our staff. And so about 3,500 have not signed the contracts, and they are still pro-Ukrainian, and they are Ukrainian patriots. So we continue to pay them salaries, and Russians just prohibited them from coming to work.
They are not allowed work at the station?
[Staff] are not allowed. [Russians] took all the security passes, and so [staff] are just staying in Enerhodar.
How much information do you have from the inside?
From the plant, we have a lot of information, actually, and we got information about, like, you know, parameters of the plant and so on. And we also have information because this is our staff. So we can contact many of them just by phone, by messages, by different means. And also, if we are talking about the current situation, it is the deepest level of degradation of the plant that is actually possible.
How long do you think this situation can last amid this risk that something really bad can happen?
If we are talking about time, this depends on how quickly [the plant] will be de-occupied. We always believed that [de-occupation could happen] in two weeks, up to one month, but this situation has already lasted for more than one year. And staff are just in constant hope that this is what finally will happen and just waiting and asking for help.
If we are talking about the worst-case scenario of what could happen with this nuclear station, what are we talking about?
It is in the heads of these occupiers. They could be crazy or could be completely crazy; the level of craziness of these occupiers is different. We don't know what they want to do. And of course, there is a lot of nuclear material at the plant. There are six nuclear power units, six reactors full of fuel, and nuclear fuel. And also, there are six spent-fuel pools, each just beside the reactor, and they are also full of spent fuel assemblies. You can just damage these materials, and then you will have a radiation release. How much will it be? How much radioactivity would go out? It depends only on how much the fuel subassembly is damaged.
Still, if we are talking about the worst-case scenario, it would be contamination of Ukraine, contamination of part of Russia, Belarus, Europe? What are we talking about?
As a possibility, again, you know, if you have damaged one fuel assembly, for example, this will be local contamination on site and maybe even in the buildings of the reactor. If you have damage in one reactor, this will be the scale of Chernobyl or the size of Fukushima. And then it will depend only on the weather conditions, where the wind will go and bring this contamination.