Bradford Campaigner on Ukraine & Nuclear power

Posted: 8th April 2022

Varrie Blowers, Secretary of BANNG discusses the implications of the war in Ukraine in the latest column for Regional Life, April, 2022. In the early hours of 4 March, fire was reported at Zaporizhzhia, the 6-reactor nuclear power station in Ukraine, Europe’s largest. The Russian army was carrying out a premeditated attack. A few days before, it had seized Chernobyl, the site in April, 1986 of the world’s worst nuclear accident……..to date. It was, mercifully, a training building that was on fire. Nonetheless, this attack on an active nuclear plant was unprecedented and in clear breach of the Geneva Conventions. But Russia was not deterred. Had there been a meltdown in a reactor or fire in the radioactive waste stores, the people of Ukraine would have been subject to a nuclear catastrophe. And the radioactive fallout of a nuclear incident of a magnitude worse than that of Chernobyl, would have had far-reaching and terrifying consequences. The incident shows for the first time the dangers of war in a nuclearised country. Nuclear plants do not seem to have been designed to cope with war. Nor can they just be switched off and abandoned. The workers at Zaporizhzhia, it has been reported, are being forced to work in conditions of exhaustion, hunger and stress – when mistakes could be made. While we hope never to experience such acts on our shores, there is the ever- present threat of terrorism and cyber-attack wreaking havoc on nuclear installations. Given what has happened, the Government should be disengaging from nuclear, not engaging in a gung-ho rush to build new plants, including Bradwell B. Chernobyl and Fukushima alerted the world to the dangers arising from nuclear accidents. Zaporizhzhia is a wake-up call demonstrating the vulnerability of nuclear plants to deliberate acts of war. BANNG 6th April 2022  https://www.banng.info/news/ukraine-nuclear-wake-up-call/