Ukrainian nuclear expert discusses the challenges of keeping the country’s nuclear facilities safe during a Russian invasion.
Amid the horrors of the past 39 days of Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine, Olena Pareniuk finds a rare moment of absurd humor.
“I wanted to be the expert in radiation safety, but I didn’t want that much experience,” Pareniuk says, laughing at the thought.
Unfortunately, Pareniuk, 35, has no choice.
As a senior researcher for Ukraine’s Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants, it’s Pareniuk’s job to investigate what happens after a disaster at a nuclear power plant. She’s spent years researching the aftermath of both the 1986 explosion and fires at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the extensive damage to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan in the wake of a tsunami in 2011.
But after Feb. 24, when Russia launched its massive assault on Ukraine and subsequently took over Chernobyl and shelled Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in the southern Zaporizhzhya region, she’s had new nightmares to ponder along with ceaseless questions about worst-case scenarios that she is tired of thinking about.
All this has occurred while Pareniuk has had to also worry about the safety of her family, which includes her husband serving in the Ukrainian military, and her three-year-old son, who has been terrified by the shockwaves of Russian bombardment.
“What is the worst-case scenario for Chernobyl?” she says, repeating a question she is often asked. “What’s the worst-case scenario for Zaporizhzhya and also, Kharkiv? There is a research facility in Kharkiv and Kharkiv is constantly being bombed by the Russians and it’s also a nuclear facility. So people are also asking what is the worst-case scenario for that facility? I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to imagine the worst-case scenarios.”
Pareniuk lost the luxury of not considering future worst-case scenarios on the morning of Feb. 24.
She was at home in Kyiv and, by the time she woke up, Ukraine was abandoning the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant ahead of advancing Russian troops.
“I woke up by 7 a.m.,” she said. “There are people who should maintain laboratories and they were over there. So, early in the morning, they were waking up and then they were forced by the Ukrainian army to get on buses, and then they were evacuated from the exclusion zone.”
Volodymyr Tarasov/ Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images
APRIL 15, 2021 – Employees stay in front of the monitors at the central control panel of the New Safe Confinement at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP), Kyiv Region, northern Ukraine.
The ensuing Russian occupation of the plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear power plant disaster where massive amounts of radioactive materials are still stored, “was really, really, scary because it was obvious they were not following the rules for visiting the exclusion zone,” said Pareniuk.
Russian troops were not wearing protective gear to prevent contamination from radioactive dust. The trucks and tanks and other vehicles they drove through the exclusion zone kicked up so much of the contaminated dust, said Pareniuk, “that our detectors were actually detecting the increase of the dose rate and it was because the Russian machines were lifting up the radioactive dust.”
They cut off the electrical supply needed to cool the water chilling spent nuclear fuel rods and, Ukrainian officials have said, stored vehicles, ammunition, and rocket-launching systems at the site that could have contributed to spreading radioactivity in the event of an accident or conflict. A large amount of the remaining radioactive material is stored in three buildings.
“If the integrity of these three buildings is injured,” said Pareniuk, “that means that radioactivity may leak into the environment. It might contaminate the soil. There is quite a lot of really highly radioactive dust inside the new system.”
The radioactivity, she said, could also leak into the air, and, depending on the wind direction, contaminate either Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, or Russia. Perhaps even more dangerous for Ukraine, she said, is the potential to contaminate Ukraine’s drinking water supply.
The site sits along the Pripyat River, which runs into the Dnipro River, the main source of drinking water for Ukraine.
“So if it gets into the water, it could cause an ecological catastrophe,” she said.
CIA handbook via Wikicommons
This map showing the radioactive contamination in the region a decade after the catastrophe at Chernobyl also shows how the plant sits along the main waterway that runs through Ukraine and provides drinking water for millions of people.
There was also the human and infrastructural toll that took place while Russians, who have since left, occupied both the Chernobyl plant and the nearby town, the site of nuclear research facilities.
The April 1986 accident at Chernobyl was, Pareniuk pointed out, largely the result of a lack of safety culture in the old USSR and mistakes made by employees under duress.
While a normal working shift for those maintaining the plant, now undergoing decommissioning, is about 12 hours, Pareniuk said that Russian occupiers kept about 150 workers in the plant for weeks on end, at gunpoint, in dire conditions. They were forced to sleep on floors and fed poor quality food with no ability to leave.
About 10 kilometers to the east, in the town of Chernobyl, Russians looted research labs, stealing radioactive material and other equipment, smashing much of what was left behind.
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