The power supply to the Chernobyl nuclear site was restored on Sunday, announced the Ukrainian nuclear agency Energoatom, citing the Ukrainian Minister of Energy.
“Today, thanks to the incredible efforts of specialists from Ukrenergo (the Ukrainian operator of the site), our nuclear engineers and electricians have succeeded in restoring the power supply to the Chernobyl power plant, seized by the Russian occupiers“, said the minister, German Galouchchenko, in a press release published by Energoatom.
“From now on, the fuel assembly cooling systems will work normally again, and no longer thanks to emergency generators“, he added.
“No major impact on safety”
On Wednesday, Ukrenergo announced that the plant, which caused the most serious civil nuclear disaster in 1986, had “been completely disconnected from the electricity grid due to the military actions of the Russian occupier“.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, however, indicated that this incident did not present “no major impact on safety“, while Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kouleba had warned that the plant had emergency generators with a capacity of only 48 hours.
The Chernobyl site, located in an exclusion zone, includes reactors that were decommissioned after 1986, including reactor number 4 covered with a sarcophagus, and radioactive waste repositories.
In the statement, the minister stressed that Ukraine had “noneed someone’s help to supply or restore electricityon its infrastructure.
The day before, Energoatom had indicated that officials from the Russian giant Rosatom had arrived on Friday at the site of another Ukrainian nuclear power plant, that of Zaporozhye, further south, bombed on March 4 and also now occupied by the Russians.
Rosatom had confirmed the dispatch of specialists to “to advisethe Ukrainian teams, while specifying that the operation of Zaporozhye remained ensured by the Ukrainian staff.