Moldova ships in radiation pills as fighting rages near Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine
euronews, By Ben Turner 15/08/2022
Moldova has imported one million iodine pills as fighting rages around a nuclear power station in neighbouring Ukraine.
The eastern European country – with a population of 2.5 million people – insisted residents should not panic as it upped its stockpile of the tablets which can prevent radioactive elements building up in the body.
Shelling has intensified near Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant – the largest of its kind in Europe – with the UN warning fighting could “lead to disaster”……………………………………..
in the event of a nuclear disaster, iodine pills will be first issued to people unable to evacuate or take shelter such as emergency workers, Moldova’s National Agency for Public Health said.
Moldovan authorities advise citizens to take cover in cellars or basements, or evacuate the area, in the event of a nuclear emergency. …………………….. more https://www.euronews.com/2022/08/15/moldova-ships-in-radiation-pills-as-fighting-rages-near-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-power-plant-i
With its failing nuclear industry, France now an importer of power, no longer an exporter.
Sweden was the biggest net exporter of power in Europe during the first
half of 2022, overtaking France, according to a new report from EnAppSys.
France has long been a major exporter of power in the European market, with
a fleet of nuclear power stations generating a stable surplus of
electricity. However, that’s beginning to change, with France shifting from
a net exporter earlier in the year to a net importer.
This fall from grace
for France has, ironically, been blamed on its nuclear power station fleet,
which is beginning to show signs of age and unreliability. In fact, the
country has found several structural problems at its nuclear power
stations, which means it’s had to plug a significant gap in its electricity
supply with power generated elsewhere.
With France unlikely to be able to
fix its nuclear fleet anytime soon, it’s also unlikely to make it to the
top of the net power exporter list anytime soon either. Instead, the top
honour goes to Sweden, which exported a total of 16 TWh during the first
half of 2022. Most of that power, 7 TWh and 4 TWh, went to neighbours
Finland and Denmark, respectively.
However, the real story for the European
power export market is that Germany – a country commonly criticised for its
energy policies due to an overreliance on Russian gas – was Europe’s second
largest exporter in the first half of 2022. It exported 15.4 TWh, with
France taking the lion’s share. The UK also noticeably saw a change in its
fortunes in the first half of 2022, with the country going from a reliable
importer of electricity to a net exporter position, with power largely
flowing back to France. However, the UK still ended the six month period as
having imported 1.5% more power than exported.
Electrical Review 12th Aug 2022
100% renewables is feasible worldwide at low cost.
Christian Breyer et al, On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy
Systems Research. Research on 100% renewable energy systems is a relatively
recent phenomenon. It was initiated in the mid-1970s, catalyzed by
skyrocketing oil prices. Since the mid-2000s, it has quickly evolved into a
prominent research field encompassing an expansive and growing number of
research groups and organizations across the world. The main conclusion of
most of these studies is that 100% renewables is feasible worldwide at low
cost.
IEEE Access 29th July 2022
Germany continues to close down its last remaining nuclear reactors
Germany’s nuclear power operators will continue to decommission the
country’s last three remaining plants, even as the government weighs
whether to keep the facilities running over the winter. E.ON, RWE and EnBW
confirmed they had not procured additional fuel to extend the life of the
Isar 2, Emsland and Neckarwestheim plants beyond the end of the year, when
they are legally-mandated to close.
FT 12th Aug 2022
https://www.ft.com/content/0257588e-0ebe-4696-8c4e-77f0a192b616
Massive 1GW-plus wind farm proposal wins Major Project status in Tasmania — RenewEconomy
Tasmania grants major project status to giga-scale wind farm proposed for Tasmania’s north-east. The post Massive 1GW-plus wind farm proposal wins Major Project status in Tasmania appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Massive 1GW-plus wind farm proposal wins Major Project status in Tasmania — RenewEconomy
Relief as ministers reset energy future and bury Coalition’s “technology neutral” sham — RenewEconomy
Ministers and the clean energy industry have celebrated Friday’s key decisions that clear path for switch to renewables, but still many details to resolve. The post Relief as ministers reset energy future and bury Coalition’s “technology neutral” sham appeared first on RenewEconomy.
Relief as ministers reset energy future and bury Coalition’s “technology neutral” sham — RenewEconomy
Respite for Japan as radioactive Fukushima water accumulation slows — Fukushima 311 Watchdogs
Photo taken from a Kyodo News helicopter in February 2022 shows tanks used to store treated water on the premises of the crippled-Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in northeastern Japan. (Kyodo) Aug 12, 2022 Tanks containing treated water at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant are likely to reach capacity around the fall of 2023, […]
Respite for Japan as radioactive Fukushima water accumulation slows — Fukushima 311 Watchdogs
More Cases of Stomach Cancer in Fukushima Prefecture — Fukushima 311 Watchdogs
Stomach cancer, which has been confirmed in Fukushima Prefecture for eight consecutive years, was also found to be more common among A-bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki August 10, 2022 Stomach Cancer Incidence Rate Rises among Women in Fukushima Prefecture Radiation levels measured at Nagadoro, Iitate Village, which we visited for the first time on […]
More Cases of Stomach Cancer in Fukushima Prefecture — Fukushima 311 Watchdogs
Legal Battles Continue over TEPCO and Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Cause — Fukushima 311 Watchdogs
PRESS CONFERENCE: Yuichi Kaido and Hiroyuki Kawai, Co-chairs of the National Association of Lawyers for a Nuclear Power Free Japan Yui Kimura, Secretary-General, TEPCO Shareholder Derivative Suit (The speech and Q & A will be in Japanese with English interpretation.) 11:00–12:00 Monday, August 8, 2022
Legal Battles Continue over TEPCO and Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Cause — Fukushima 311 Watchdogs
August 15 Energy News — geoharvey
Science and Technology: ¶ “XPeng Bringing Truly Ultrafast Charging To Town” • Chinese EV startup XPeng is on the verge of releasing an EV that will be able to charge at a wicked-fast pace. According to the company, the G9 will be able to gain 200 kilometers (124 miles) of driving range in just 5 […]
August 15 Energy News — geoharvey
Nuclear bomb tests at Maralinga triggered Hedley Marston to study fallout over Australia
ABC Radio Adelaide / By Daniel Keane 10 Aug 22,
Hedley Marston could be charming, genial and witty but he was not above fulmination, especially where fulminations of a different kind were concerned.
In the mid-1950s, the CSIRO biochemist emerged as arguably the most significant contemporary critic of Britain’s nuclear weapons testing program, which was launched on Australia’s Montebello Islands almost 70 years ago in October 1952.
Despite the imminent anniversary Marston remains an obscure figure, but his biographer Roger Cross believes that should change.
“He appears to be totally unknown to the Australian public and, of course, to South Australians — he was a South Australian after all,” Dr Cross said.
Marston’s reservations about the nuclear program were far from spontaneous; indeed, his strongest concerns weren’t voiced until several years after the first test, when he recorded a radioactive plume passing over Adelaide.
The source of that plume was Operation Buffalo, a series of four nuclear blasts in 1956, and Marston was especially outraged by the fact that the general population was not warned.
“Sooner or later the public will demand a commission of enquiry on the ‘fall out’ in Australia,” he wrote to nuclear physicist and weapons advocate Sir Mark Oliphant.
“When this happens some of the boys will qualify for the hangman’s noose.”
What made Marston’s fury difficult to dismiss, especially for those inclined to deride opposition to nuclear testing as the exclusive preserve of ‘commies’ and ‘conchies’, was the fact that he was no peacenik.
Detractors might have damned him as an arriviste, but never as an activist: his cordial relations with Oliphant and other scientific grandees demonstrate that Marston was, in many respects, an establishment man.
Dr Cross has described Marston’s elegant prose as “Churchillian”, and the adjective is apposite in other ways.
While the roguish Marston might not have gone as far as the British wartime leader’s assertion that, during conflict, truth is so precious “that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies”, he had, in a 1947 letter to the editor, publicly defended scientific secrecy:
Under present conditions of fear and mistrust among nations it is obvious that military technology must be kept secret; and to achieve this end it should be conducted in special military laboratories where strictest security measures may be observed.”
But by late 1956, Marston’s alarm at radioactive fallout across parts of Australia was such that he was privately demanding greater disclosures to the general public.
Much of his ire was aimed at the Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee — a body established before the Maralinga tests, but after blasts had already occurred at Emu Fields* and the Montebello Islands.
“He was the only senior Australian scientist to express concerns and, because of his character, the concerns that he expressed were very forthright,” said Dr Cross, whose biography of Marston, aptly entitled Fallout, inspired the documentary Silent Storm.
“When the safety committee after each explosion said there was absolutely no effect on Australians, he believed that they were lying.”
‘If the wind changes, we need to go’
The experiments that led Marston, whose reputation largely rested on his expertise in sheep nutrition, to reach this conclusion were two-fold.
In the more protracted one, he analysed the presence of radioactive iodine-131 — a common component of nuclear fallout — in the thyroids of sheep.
“One group he kept penned up under cover eating dried hay, which had been cut some time before. The other group, he put outside eating the grass,” Dr Cross said.
“He tested the thyroids in each group – the ones on the hay only had background amounts of iodine-131.
“But the ones in the fields had a tremendously high concentration of this radioactive isotope, both north and south of the city.”
A fallout map from the 1985 royal commission, which stated that while fallout at Maralinga Village from the October 11, 1956, test was “considered to be ‘negligible from a biological point of view’ it does suggest difficulties with the forecast prior to the test”.(Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia)
For the other experiment, Marston conducted air monitoring in Adelaide.
He was especially alarmed by what he found for the period following the Maralinga test of October 11, 1956.
“There was a wind shear and at least part, maybe the major part, of that cloud, blew in a south-easterly direction and that took it towards Adelaide and the country towns in between,” Dr Cross said.
“The safety committee — who must have known of the wind shear — had done nothing about warning Adelaide people perhaps to stay indoors.”……………………………………………………
Despite Marston’s reservations, the nuclear program carried on regardless.
Less than a year after the Operation Buffalo tests, Maralinga was hosting Operation Antler.
In September 1957, newspapers around Australia reported on an upcoming “second test” that would, weather permitting, proceed as part of a “spring series”.
If it hadn’t been for the presence of the words “atomic” and “radioactive”, a reader might easily have inferred that what was being described was as commonplace as a game of cricket.
 |
Elon Musk’s SpaceX now leaving junk in our own backyard
Independent Australia, By Darren Crawford | 10 August 2022 After a SpaceX capsule crashed onto an Australian farm, we’re left wondering if Elon Musk will clean up his own mess, writes Darren Crawford.
ACCORDING TO the ABC, the Australian Space Agency (ASA) has confirmed that debris found in a sheep paddock in the Snowy Mountains region of New South Wales, Australia, belongs to Elon Musk’s SpaceX Dragon capsule, which was launched in November 2020.
Local authorities were alerted after nearby residents heard a loud bang earlier this year on 9 July. It is now thought the bang was the noise of the capsule re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. New South Wales Police and the ASA visited one of the sites on Saturday 31 July and confirmed that two of the pieces are from a SpaceX mission.
According to the ABC, the ASA is continuing to engage with its counterparts in the U.S. as well as other parts of the Commonwealth and local authorities.
An ASA spokesperson said:
“The agency is operating under the Australian Government Space Re-entry Debris Plan which outlines roles and responsibilities for key Australian government agencies and committees in supporting the response to space re-entry debris.”
So who is responsible for the clean-up?
According to the ABC report, the space debris will remain in place for now. However, the pieces could eventually be returned to U.S. soil.
Australian National University’s Institute of Space deputy director Dr Cassandra Steer said there was an obligation under international space law to repatriate any debris to the country from where it originated.
Dr Steer went on to confirm that “Any space object, or part thereof, has to be repatriated” and should be sent back to the U.S. However, SpaceX has only confirmed that the debris is theirs and is yet to commit to the costs associated with returning it to the U.S.
Dr Steer added:
“We have clarity in terms of lines of responsibilities. The U.S. is liable for any damage that is caused by this space debris… and Australia could go to the U.S. and seek some form of compensation if there are any costs involved in cleaning it up.”
Elon Musk and SpaceX have a poor environmental record
As reported earlier this year, Elon Musk and fellow billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos are currently participating in a dick-swinging rocket contest to see who can get to Mars first. Suffering from massive rocket envy, these three men are speeding up the climate change process by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide and other gases in the Earth’s atmosphere with every launch.
The Guardian reports that one rocket launch alone can release up to 300 tons of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s upper atmosphere and it can stay there for years. This is in comparison to a standard long-haul flight which produces three tons of carbon dioxide per passenger/per flight, into the lower atmosphere.
These impacts do not include what happens on the ground during a launch, including the heat and noise pollution in the immediate area, or the impacts on local wildlife.
There appear to be few controls put in place to protect the planet and its inhabitants from falling space junk by Elon Musk and SpaceX. In March 2021, a SpaceX rocket blew up on launch and debris was scattered throughout the protected area. According to a local non-profit environmental group, it took three months to clean up the mess.
According to the report, launch site ditches on SpaceX land and public property in the U.S. have dumped runoff water directly into the tidal flats threatening local fish breeding grounds, and public beaches and roads have been closed for longer than the agreed times.
Finally, at an earlier launch in 2018, a jettisoned SpaceX booster rocket missed its target drone ship a few hundred kilometres out to sea and destroyed itself on impact slamming into the ocean at 500 km/hour.
So, will Elon Musk and SpaceX clean up their mess down under?
This is the great unknown, as Elon Musk’s environmental record in relation to his SpaceX program is extremely poor.
It is also clear, as can be seen by his recently abandoned Twitter purchase, that Elon Musk doesn’t care who he burns, or how hard he burns them, to get his own way.
It is apparent that Elon Musk sees the increasing amount of pollution produced by his SpaceX endeavours as little more than collateral damage and less of a threat to our civilisation. Similarly, he doesn’t care whose backyard he trashes (as long as it’s not his, obviously).
Instead of turning his immense intelligence (and wealth) to solving our current problems, Elon Musk (and his billionaire space mates) seek to exacerbate these problems by polluting the planet further.
It will be interesting to see whether he does the right thing by the Australian Government and its people and pays for the clean-up of his mess.
Update, 10 August 2022:
The ABC is reporting that SpaceX has confirmed that the space debris spread throughout an Australian sheep paddock is indeed remnants of their Dragon Capsule and is sending a team down under to investigate………………………….
What was not stated was whether any ASA or government agencies were aware of or engaged in any of SpaceX’s planning. Space Law Lecturer at UNSW Canberra, Duncan Blake, wondered if they had coordinated with Australian agencies prior to their risk assessment — “If they didn’t, then that seems somewhat arrogant to make a decision that affects Australia without consulting Australians,” he said.
There has been no mention of the cost of removal or the debris, or as to whether Elon Musk and SpaceX will be more honest and open in the future and advise all Australians about the potential damage falling SpaceX junk may cause in their country.
https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/elon-musks-spacex-now-leaving-junk-in-our-own-backyard,16650
Groups join together to sign WA Nuclear Free Charter against uranium mining
Neil Watkinson & Stuart McKinnon, Kalgoorlie Miner, Thu, 11 August 2022
Nineteen groups representing thousands of West Australians have signed a joint statement against uranium mining in WA.
Their pledge comes as a $658 million merger of uranium mining companies Deep Yellow and Vimy Resources was confirmed this month, alongside plans to advance their $393m Mulga Rock project 290km east-north-east of Kalgoorlie-Boulder.
The groups — which include trade unions, faith groups and conservation organisations — have expressed their support for the WA Nuclear Free Charter which calls on the WA Government to remove any outstanding approvals for uranium mining at four sites across the State.
Three of the four sites — Kintyre, Yeelirrie and Wiluna — have missed development deadlines for approvals, but Mulga Rock remains active after Vimy achieved “substantial commencement” from the the State Government in December.
The price for uranium fell into the doldrums following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, but the industry has been making much noise recently about a brighter future.
……………………….. Deep Yellow plans to revise and update a definitive feasibility study for Mulga Rock to include a base metals component, which was a condition of its original approval to develop the project.
The company also hopes to complete a definitive feasibility study for the company’s other project, Tumas in Namibia, by the end of the year.
Mulga Rock is expected to deliver 3.5 million pounds of uranium oxide per annum while Tumas is slated to produce 3Mlb a year.
But anti-uranium mining groups are marshalling themselves to continue fighting against the Mulga Rock project.
Signatories to the WA Nuclear Free Charter include UnionsWA and the WA branches of the Australian Manufacturers Workers Union, Electrical Trades Union, United Workers Union, State School Teachers Union, United Professional Firefighters Union and the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, along with faith, health, and national and state environment organisations.
The charter describes uranium mining as “unwanted”, “uneconomic” and a “damaging and underperforming sector that unnecessarily risks our unique environment”.
Mia Pepper from the Conservation Council of WA — one of the many conservation groups to have endorsed the charter — urged the State Government to withdraw “expired and deficient” approvals for the four uranium mine proposals in WA.
“Consistently, the people of WA have said that they do not want uranium mining in their State,” she said.
“The current government, like many Labor governments before them, hold a strong clear position opposed to uranium mining because it puts workers, communities and the environment under threat.
“Now is the time to create lasting protections against uranium mining in WA by withdrawing outdated and deficient approvals.
“Uranium mining is different. It is radioactive, leaving behind long-lasting wastes which pose an ongoing threat to public health and the environment.
“No uranium mine in Australia has ever been successfully and completely rehabilitated.
“The Ranger uranium mine in the NT is undergoing a $2.2 billion clean-up, fortunately by a company with the money and resources to do so.
“In WA the one advancing uranium project — Mulga Rock — is being pushed by Deep Yellow . . . and we have no confidence they can do what bigger better resourced companies are failing to do.
“This government knows the risks, the costs and the legacy of this toxic trade which is why they have a strong anti-uranium policy.
“Along with unions, health, faith and environment groups we’re calling on the government to act now to put an end to uranium mining in WA.” https://www.kalminer.com.au/news/kalgoorlie-miner/groups-join-together-to-sign-wa-nuclear-free-charter-against-uranium-mining-c-7798925
The United States, in decline but still able to kill us all.
The march of folly in American strategic policy has enshrined the madness of control by a giant defence industry and defence budget now past $800 billion.
The fiercely presented wearisome trope of commitment to a Rules Based International Order is quite suddenly unmasked as an American Establishment desire to maintain a unipolar control of the world, with violence.
The fiercely presented wearisome trope of commitment to a Rules Based International Order is quite suddenly unmasked as an American Establishment desire to maintain a unipolar control of the world, with violence.
The global dominance of the United States, in so many fields, from space, to science, to entertainment, to sport, to novelty in the development of the English language, has been taken for granted, is part of our fabric of Australian existence.
Reinforced by the Covid Era of Isolation, Netflix, Facebook, and Computer Games and inability even to get to Bali or Thailand let alone China, we are now in a noisy metal barrel where even dissident voices seem projections from the dissident voices of the US, similarly muted and squeezed. At a time when the US and its roles in the world are suddenly dramatically changing.
The undoing of the United States, the collapse of the imperial centre, is happening with little awareness in Australia. Our generally oblivious mindframes affect the capacity of political leaders to reflect upon or point to core problems of our world. Richard Adams, the author of Watership Down, that great rabbit adventure full of meaning for human society, coined the rabbit language word ‘tharn’ for the mental state of rabbits caught in the headlights and stuck. We are a tharn nation, gabbling about entertainments and irritations, eyes glued to the seatback monitor, not wanting to know that the plane is crashing.
Heed these markers:
- The Americans were first to the moon, but NASA after the retirement of the space shuttle has depended on Russian rockets to get to their joint space station. The Russians are now planning to remove the propulsion units of the station which keep it from crashing, their property, for use on a bigger new venture. America is losing in space, though US private business has appallingly taken the lead in cluttering near space with junk.
- The fiercely presented wearisome trope of commitment to a Rules Based International Order is quite suddenly unmasked as an American Establishment desire to maintain a unipolar control of the world, with violence. This is being unmasked in much of the world if not NATO and AUKUS and the conservative acolytes in Japan and ROK. Ideological assertions of democracy versus autocracy, built by vilification and isolation of China and Russia, is rotting from the head as big democracies are in serious trouble.
- We are doing OK in Australia, our minds from age 12 filled with bubblegum flavoured vape and Tiktok, graduating to Facebook and the metaverse, and with a newer, kinder, kinda-tealish government we can all go to sleep, take off our masks and order American franchised fast food. Or real Aussie drinks. But while we have had a narrow focus on bad boys in the SAS we fail to review our complicity in the great crimes of the twenty first century, led by champions of democracy, smashing the lives of people in a number of countries far more violently than has the Ukraine war so far. Biden and his Secretary of State were advocates for invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, so appallingly bringing down bad governments and making countries ungovernable. Creating Al Qaeda and ISIS in the process, directly through funding and arming extremists (in Afghanistan beginning before the Russians were invited into Afghanistan) and via embitterment of ordinary people. The world is destabilised, American control is widely undone.
- The march of folly in American strategic policy has enshrined the madness of control by a giant defence industry and defence budget now past $800 billion. Poverty of foreign policy has led to regimes of sanctions which have been substantially shaped by Richard Nephew whose book reveals that far from focusing on potentates and oligarchs, the targets of sanctions must be ordinary people and the purpose is to inflict pain and weaken resolve (his words). Consider sanctions related deaths in Iraq Venezuela Cuba, Afghanistan Pain but no loss of resolve, hatred not submission. The US official study of the effects of strategic bombing on Germany in World War II by J K Galbraith and others long ago suggested morale and resolve were increased by the bombing of cities and civilians. And yet we have the ongoing commitment to defend and achieve democracy by mass murder, with constant focus on disruption, regime change, and violence… not on peace.
- Jeffrey Sachs has recently returned to the themes of his 2013 book on the 50th anniversary of President John Kennedy’s Commencement Speech at American University in 1963. Speaking in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy spoke of peace not as an event or a state but a constant process of engagement. We now have no such thing, we are in an Age of Hostility, Meanness, Folly, and Decay.right wing is fervently in support. Stanley Kubrick made a movie about such madness, we are sleeping through it.
Australia recognises, as does the United States, that Taiwan is part of China. Though the media vague up the history, China kicked the Portuguese and Dutch out of Taiwan early in the 1600s, long before the greatest land grab in history, of Britain over the Australian continent, could even be imagined as the British didn’t know it was there then. The government in Taipei is the Government of the Republic of China. The large opposition party in the National Assembly is the Kuomintang, ruling party of the government of the Republic of China that lost the revolutionary war on the mainland in 1949 and retreated to Taiwan. The ROC held the China seat in the UN until 1971 with American backing. The majority of local governments in Taiwan are governed by the KMT because the party of the national government is on the nose both because of its independence-advocating foreign policy and corruption allegations. Pelosi’s visit risks great power war as not seen since 1945. The American right wing is fervently in support. Stanley Kubrick made a movie about such madness, we are sleeping through it.
The US economy is in serious trouble………………………………….
The US campaign for unipolar dominance has included partly fabricated propaganda against China and Russia. This no longer convinces or concerns a wide sweep of the world beyond NATO, the G7, the EU and AUKUS. Mix in enough lies and it all seems lies.
The summit meeting of BRICS in June seemed a more constructive meeting than the G7. The countries of Eurasia also have the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation SCO. The Iran,Russia, Turkey summit meeting in Tehran in July 2022 seems to have been more successful than President Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia to meet also other Arab leaders, a visit described by the Wall Street Journal as worse than an embarrassment,…………………………..more https://johnmenadue.com/the-united-states-in-decline-but-still-able-to-kill-us-all/
Ukraine Plant Under Fire Showcases ‘Dangerous’ Nature of Nuclear Power, Experts Say
“Having reactors in a war zone is a nightmare waiting to become a grim reality,” said one critic.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/08/08/ukraine-plant-under-fire-showcases-dangerous-nature-nuclear-power-experts-say KENNY STANCIL, August 8, 2022 Critics of atomic energy on Monday described the shelling of the Zaporizhzhia power station in southeastern Ukraine as “a warning that nuclear power plants are a liability, not an asset, especially under extreme conditions of war or climate change.”
While Kyiv and Moscow continue to trade blame for recent strikes on the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, advocates at Beyond Nuclear emphasized that regardless of who is at fault, damage to the six-reactor site could have deadly consequences “far beyond the war zone.”
“If even just one of the six operational reactors there suffered catastrophic damage and released its radioactive inventory we are talking about a humanitarian disaster that would dwarf Chernobyl,” Linda Pentz Gunter, international specialist at Beyond Nuclear, said in a statement.
Radioactive contamination from that 1986 nuclear accident in what is now Ukraine rendered an area of more than 1,000 square miles uninhabitable and caused the illnesses and deaths of potentially hundreds of thousands of people.
According to Beyond Nuclear, reactors at Zaporizhzhia “contain far more radioactivity, both in the working reactors and in the irradiated fuel pools, than was present at the relatively new Chernobyl Unit 4 when it exploded.”
“This situation brings home all too alarmingly just how dangerous nuclear power is as an energy source,” said Gunter. “We would not be having this conversation if we were dealing with solar panels or wind turbines.”
“The potential to cause a catastrophic accident even on a good day should have been enough to end the use of this technology,” she added. “Having reactors in a war zone is a nightmare waiting to become a grim reality.”
Beyond Nuclear is not alone in sounding the alarm about the dire consequences that could materialize following damage to Zaporizhzhia or any other nuclear power plants now at risk in Ukraine.
Last week, Shaun Burnie, senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace, told Democracy Now! that “nuclear plants are extremely vulnerable to external attack in the context of a war zone.” He added, “You’re looking at potential massive releases of radioactivity, potentially even greater than Chernobyl.”
Buildings housing nuclear reactors are not designed to withstand missile attacks nor extreme weather events. In March 2011, a massive earthquake and tsunami led to a loss of power in three reactor buildings at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan, with calamitous results. As the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis supercharges storms, nuclear infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable to damage of that sort.
This is not the first time that nuclear engineers at Zaporizhzhia have found themselves under military assault. Russian shelling of the facility in early March sparked a fire.
None of the reactor buildings or fuel storage sites were affected then. “But after more than five months of fighting,” Beyond Nuclear explained Monday, “the site has become more perilous, given its proximity to the eastern regions that are at the heart of contention between the two countries.”
“The risk of fire is one of the most serious hazards at nuclear power plants on a routine basis,” said Paul Gunter, reactor oversight specialist at Beyond Nuclear. “A fire at Zaporizhzhia could spread to the irradiated fuel storage pools located outside primary containment and lead to explosions and meltdowns.”
“If the fuel pools are damaged and cooling water boils away, exposing the highly radioactive rods to air, we could see hydrogen explosions and the spread of radioactivity far worse than occurred at Fukushima,” he continued.
Winds would distribute radioactive gases across Europe and, depending on the scale of the disaster, beyond, potentially reaching as far away as the United States. A Greenpeace analysis published earlier this year warned that severe damage to Zaporizhzhia could render large swaths of Europe “uninhabitable for decades.”
Radioactive fallout from the facility could subject tens of millions of people to chronic or fatal health problems, with the effects of exposure lasting for years on end.
Thirty-six years after Ukraine’s first nuclear disaster, “people still living in Chernobyl-contaminated areas are showing increases in cardiovascular disorders, issues with sight and respiration, and significantly increased rates of birth defects and deformities,” said Cindy Folkers, radiation and health hazards specialist at Beyond Nuclear.
“Given the far greater amounts of radiation that could be released in the event of a major disaster at Zaporizhzhia, we would expect to see greater numbers of people seriously harmed and for far longer than the health impacts caused by Chornobyl,” Folkers said.
1 This month.
PETITION – To: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Australian Labor Government
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/235274195556
19 May – Webinar- Webinar: No Nuclear Weapons in Australia
Start: 2026-05-19 18:00:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
End: 2026-05-19 19:30:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
20 May – Webinar – The dangerous world of AUKUS, US, military occupation and suppression of dissent
National Webinar, 20th May, 2026, 6.30pm AEST. Confronting laws restricting/suppressing protest speech and action
Speakers: Former Sen. Rex Patrick, Lawyer Nick Hanna ,Arthur Rorris ,Jorgen Doyle, Sen David Shoebbridge,
Facilitator Kelley Tranter.
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity
Antinuclear 