External power to the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has been cut for more than three days, raising safety concerns over the six-reactor site on the frontline of the Ukraine war. Emergency generators are currently powering cooling and safety systems after the final power line into the plant was severed on the Russian side at 4:56 pm on Tuesday. John Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has expressed deep concerns about the situation and met with Vladimir Putin on Thursday, but no resolution has been reached.
Western experts and Ukrainian officials fear that Russia is manufacturing a crisis to consolidate control over the plant, Europe’s largest, and is taking high-risk steps to turn on at least one reactor despite wartime conditions. Russia has been accused by one Ukrainian government official of using the nuclear power station as a bargaining chip.
Stress tests by European regulators after the 2011 Japanese reactor disaster at Fukushima revealed that a nuclear plant should be able to operate without external power for 72 hours. Going beyond that time limit is untested, according to Ukrainian sources.
Russia seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in March 2022, and its reactors were put into cold shutdown for safety. Ukraine has claimed the plant as its own, but it has cropped up in negotiations between Donald Trump and Putin. Trump has suggested that the US could take control of the reactors, while the Kremlin has said that they want to restart all of the reactors and connect them to the Russian grid – a task considered feasible only during peacetime.
External power has been lost at Zaporizhzhia nine times before, with the damage inflicted each time by Russian forces striking energy infrastructure across the Dnipro. As of now, the final 750-kilovolt electricity line was damaged on the Russian side, about a mile from the plant.
The IAEA stated that Russia’s operators claim they have enough diesel to power the generators for 20 days without fuel resupply. If the generators were to fail, there would be a risk that the nuclear fuel in the six reactors could heat uncontrollably over a period of weeks, leading to a meltdown, according to Ukrainian sources.
Similar to the Fukushima accident, the hot reactors at Zaporizhzhia could overheat and eventually melt down without proper cooling. While no one was killed in the Fukushima incident, over 100,000 people were evacuated.
Signs indicate that Russia is close to installing a new power line into the Zaporizhzhia plant, running through occupied territories, to resolve the crisis. Satellite imagery analysis by Greenpeace revealed 125 miles of construction from the Russian grid in the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol, but it is unclear if a final connection to the power plant has been made.
Shuam Burnie, the senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace Ukraine, has called on the head of the IAEA to intervene and tell the Russian government to abandon its plans for reactor restart and clarify that they alone are responsible for the nuclear safety and security crisis.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/27/safety-fears-as-external-power-to-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-still-out-after-three-days
