Members of staff at Ukraine’s Chornobyl nuclear power plant have been talking to the BBC about their ordeals and the dangerous situation with the plant when it was occupied by invading Russian forces on the first day of the ongoing war. The plant has now been taken back by Ukraine’s armed forces.
In the report, engineer Valeriy Semonov said it was hard to find fuel to keep the generator running. “We had to constantly negotiate with them, and try hard not to offend them, so that they allowed our personnel to manage the facility,” he underlined. When the power to the station was cut off for three days, Valeriy said he scrambled to find fuel to keep the generator running, even resorting to stealing some from the Russians, though the report did not go into the details of this.
Oleksandr Lobada, a radiation safety supervisor at Chornobyl, said this period was crucial. “If we had lost power [completely], it could have been catastrophic,” Oleksandr explained. “Radioactive material could have been released. The scale of it, you can well imagine. I wasn’t scared for my life. I was scared about what would happen if I wasn’t there monitoring the plant. I was scared it would be a tragedy for humanity.”
Enerhoatom, Ukraine’s state-run nuclear power agency, has said Russian soldiers who dug trenches around the plant were exposed to “significant doses” of radiation.
“We were able to keep the site safe. But it’s upsetting that they took 169 of our military,” said Valeriy Semenov. Their whereabouts are not known, though Chornobyl staff believe they are in Russia. The men were guarding the plant.
The article is available in its entirety here.
