Chernobyl plant disconnected from power grid; Ukraine demands cease-fire for urgent repairs

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Washington Post

Ukraine’s closed Chernobyl nuclear power plant has been disconnected from the nation’s power grid by Russian forces, Ukraine’s state-owned grid operator Ukrenergo said Wednesday, potentially jeopardizing the cooling of nuclear fuel still stored at the site.
10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint

“Because of military actions of Russian occupiers the nuclear power plant in Chornobyl was fully disconnected from the power grid. The nuclear station has no power supply,” Ukrenergo said in a statement on its official Telegram page, using Ukraine’s spelling for the plant. Electricity is needed for cooling, ventilation and fire extinguishing systems at the closed site. In a statement on its Facebook page, Ukrenergo also said emergency diesel generators have been turned on but that fuel would last for only 48 hours.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba demanded a cease-fire with Russia to allow repairs on Wednesday.“The only electrical grid supplying the Chornobyl NPP and all its nuclear facilities occupied by Russian army is damaged,” he tweeted. “I call on the international community to urgently demand Russia to cease fire and allow repair units to restore power supply.”

He warned that after reserve diesel generators run out of fuel, “cooling systems of the storage facility for spent nuclear fuel will stop, making radiation leaks imminent. Putin’s barbaric war puts entire Europe in danger.” Ukrainian Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko said Wednesday, according to Reuters, that authorities do not know what the radiation levels are at the Chernobyl power plant and have no control over what is happening at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest nuclear plant, which was seized by Russian forces last week.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/09/chernobyl-ukraine-russia-iaea-nuclear-monitoring-lost/

---

Of course when that plant had the explosion, Ukraine was still absorbed under the USSR but in the process of becoming independent.

[Emile]

1. Not good!

[LiberalFighter]

2. That should be considered a war crime too.

[Irish_Dem]

3. Yes.

[mopinko]

5. i believe it is.

i've read here that wrecking civilian infrastructure is a war crime.

[former9thward]

10. If that were true the U.S. committed a lot of war crimes in Iraq,

Afghanistan and Vietnam. Not to mention WW II.

[HUAJIAO]

12. +1000000 And that's not all. We could start with Native Americans and just keep going......

[BumRushDaShow]

26. No you can start before that with their biggest commodity while they were negotiating treaties

with Native Americans (before later slaughtering them) -

[HUAJIAO]

27. Yes. Thank you for the reminder.

[Wicked Blue]

4. Reserve diesel generator capacity 48 hours according to Ukraine Foreign Minister

Last edited Wed Mar 9, 2022, 10:21 AM - Edit history (1)

Link to tweet

[Lonestarblue]

7. The ISEA sees no issue with safety. What am I missing here?

If the cooling of the nuclear material stops and they heat, won’t they explode sending radiation particles over many miles? NATO is worried about Putin launching a nuclear attack while his forces are potentially causing a nuclear meltdown! Ukraine has several nuclear power plants. Does the West really want untrained Russian troops in charge of them?

[progree]

9. The fuel doesn't need active cooling forever. The accident was in 1986,

The last unit was shut down in 2000.

I'm no expert on spent fuel cooling, but we have plenty stored at nuclear plant sites around the country in dry storage casks, with only natural convective cooling (no electricity used or required). Including "next door" to me at the Prairie Island nuclear power plant. Edit: and upwind from me at the Monticello nuclear power plant.

I think it has to sit in spent fuel storage pools with active cooling (requiring electrically powered circulation) for ... I'm getting all kinds of answers...., but not 20+ years.

https://www.google.com/search?q=spent+nuclear+fuel+-+how+long+does+it+have+to+be+cooled

Edited to add - they might be cooling more recent fuel from other plants. See #13 for a statement from Energoaton, Ukraine's national nuclear energy company.

[FBaggins]

15. Essentially correct

We can't get too specific because we don't know all the details of Russian/Ukrainian spent fuel storage... but in the US the fuel could have been moved to air-cooled storage years ago. There isn't enough remaining activity to constitute much risk.

But let's discuss the current situation. It may be true that there is only generating capacity for 48 hours (which seems unlikely because the amount of power needed is so small), but that's a fuel constraint - not a generator constraint. The timeframe can be stretched by simply acquiring more diesel fuel. Even were that to fail, a spent fuel pool where the "freshest" spent fuel is over 20 years old doesn't really need water circulation... it just needs water (and then mostly just to provide shielding for anyone around the pool). Fuel that old would take a very long time to raise the water temperature to the point where it started to evaporate significantly. At that point, remediation could be as simple as running a garden hose to keep it topped off.

[BumRushDaShow]

18. I don't think the "spent fuel" was so much the issue

vs what was actually still-reactive fuel because of the explosion and core meltdown.

They probably had spent fuel rods in storage somewhere but my concern is about what they have had to do over the decades to contain the stuff that wasn't "spent".

See what I posted here - https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=2884921

[FBaggins]

23. Spent fuel is all that's involved here

The material from the original meltdown at unit #4 isn't being kept underwater and doesn't depend on power supplies. It's just sealed off from the environment with the "new safe confinement" structure.

[BumRushDaShow]

25. Scratch all of that - I just figured out what the heck was going on

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=2885028

Simple explanation - Ukraine JUST opened a brand new nuclear waste storage facility in April 2021. It is located on the grounds (in the exclusion zone) of Chernobyl. The plan was that instead of paying Russia to remove, ship and store their spent rods at a cost (of apparently $200 million per the article - not sure for what time period), they can store their own stuff from all of their plants, "in-country", at this new location.

And Russia targeted that facility for reasons that should be obvious - $$$ (at least in the short term).

[FBaggins]

28. No... that's not it

ISF2 is a dry cask storage facility a few miles from the reactors. No water circulation (or power) needed.

[BumRushDaShow]

29. The issue is that they are attacking "storage" locations NOT the reactors

When the average person hears the word "Chernobyl", and "Russia attacked", the first thing that comes to mind is an attack on the actual nuclear plant and its reactors. NOT spent fuel "storage" locations at the site.

I.e., it's obvious that spent rods are not the same as what is in the reactor. The media reports have been horrible about broadly using the term "Chernobyl" and that site (and its seclusion zone) is large and has all sorts of entities on the property.

[FBaggins]

30. They aren't "attacking" anything in this story

The OP is about a power outage, not an attack. The reported (though unsupported) concern is that lack of cooling would cause a problem in the spent fuel pool. You were the one who brought up "still reactive" fuel that isn't "spent" and then shifted to an imagined target

The pool is on-site with the reactors. The new storage location is some distance away and is not related to the OP (as it doesn't require any power).

[BumRushDaShow]

31. The OP also says this --

Article's FIRST paragraph says this -

Ukraine’s closed Chernobyl nuclear power plant has been disconnected from the nation’s power grid by Russian forces, Ukraine’s state-owned grid operator Ukrenergo said Wednesday, potentially jeopardizing the cooling of nuclear fuel still stored at the site

and them the OP continues with his -

“Because of military actions of Russian occupiers the nuclear power plant in Chornobyl was fully disconnected from the power grid.

It IS all related. IF Russia had not had tanks rumbling around within the exclusion zone, and kicking up radioactive soil, causing havoc at the site, then we would be here talking about this.

[BumRushDaShow]

17. The difference though

is that "spent (no longer reactive) fuel" is different from "still partially reactive fuel" that resulted with the explosion and melt-down of Chernobyl Reactor 4. I am thinking something closer to Fukushima Daiichi (but worse), where the "lowest" (and very first) type of nuclear plant disaster would be Three Mile island with that partial meltdown and continued need for containment and eventual decontamination of the site. In 2019, 40 years after that 1979 disaster, they finally shut the whole thing down (including the still operational Reactor 1).

This was an article that came out when the earthquake and tsunami happened in Japan (2011) and discussed how Russia had become a leading seller of reactors around the world -

Nuclear Industry in Russia Sells Safety, Taught by Chernobyl


By Andrew E. Kramer

March 22, 2011

MOSCOW — It was truly a trial by fire — one that has now become part of Russia’s nuclear marketing message. Cynical as that might seem. In April 1986, as workers and engineers scrambled to keep the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s molten radioactive uranium from burrowing into the earth — the so-called China syndrome — a Soviet physicist on the scene devised a makeshift solution for containing remnants of the liquefied core. Teams of coal miners working in shifts tunneled underneath the smoldering reactor and built a platform of steel and concrete, cooled by water piped in from outside the plant’s perimeter.

In the end the improvised core-catcher was not needed. The melted fuel burned through three stories of the reactor’s basement but stopped at the foundation — where the mass remains so highly radioactive that scientists still cannot approach it. Although 25 years later Chernobyl remains the radiation calamity by which all subsequent nuclear accidents will be measured, core-catchers are now a design feature of the newest reactors that Russia’s state-owned nuclear power company, Rosatom, is selling around the world. That includes a contract the company signed with Belarus just last week, even as radioactive steam was rising from the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan.

(snip)

Igor V. Kudrik, an authority on Russia’s nuclear industry at the Bellona Foundation, a Norwegian environmental group, said Russian reactor designs had indeed improved greatly since Chernobyl, which was built without a containment vessel. But the industry lacks independent oversight in Russia’s politically centralized system, he said, leaving profit motive alone to guide development. “They promote this technology only because it engages the enormous military nuclear industry left over from Soviet times,” he said. Pressurized water reactors, like the Rosatom VVER that is the company’s current standard, and the 40-year-old General Electric Mark I boiling water reactor at the Fukushima plant, are inherently safer than Chernobyl-style reactors.

In both boiling water and pressurized water reactors, water cools the fuel and sustains the nuclear reaction. The water that floods the spaces between fuel rods slows neutrons, necessary for the reaction. Thus, in both designs, if the coolant is lost the reaction will stop, following the laws of physics — though, as the disaster-management team in Japan knows all too well, the shutdown does nothing to dissipate still-dangerous residual heat. So, despite Rosatom’s core-catcher feature for arresting meltdowns, its reactors may be as potentially vulnerable to release of radioactive material if the water-cooling system failed — as happened at Fukushima Daiichi.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/business/energy-environment/23chernobyl.html

Chernobyl had to do an Apollo 13-style jerry-rigging of the plant to create what would be that "core catcher" idea for better containment, the type of which is something that is now done routinely with the construction of newer reactors and plants, but that was not "formally" in place at Chernobyl.

[progree]

20. Both the Energoatom and the IAEA statements only mention the spent fuel storage pools

#13 and #6 / #19.

[BumRushDaShow]

24. That is apparently what the Russians were attacking

and would probably be okay.

This is where the reactor is-



My concern has been whether there were any errant attacks near the reactor that had the meltdown which is within that large dome structure and where this coagulated mess is contained within -



Did a quick search and found this - the Chernobyl nuclear waste facility was just opened almost a year ago (April 2021) and this is what that facility looked like (before Russia started attacking that) -

Ukraine opens new nuclear waste site at Chernobyl

By YURAS KARMANAU April 26, 2021


KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine’s president on Monday unveiled a new nuclear waste repository at Chernobyl, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster that unfolded exactly 35 years ago. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Chernobyl together with Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and vowed to “transform the exclusion zone, as Chernobyl is referred to, into a revival zone.”

“Ukraine is not alone, it has wide support (from its) partners,” Zelenskyy said. “Today the new repository has been put into operation and it is very important that today a license to maintain the new repository will be obtained.” The Ukrainian authorities decided to use the deserted exclusion zone around the Chernobyl power plant to build a place where Ukraine could store its nuclear waste for the next 100 years. The ex-Soviet nation currently has four nuclear power plants operating and has to transport its nuclear waste to Russia.

The new repository will allow the government to save up $200 million a year. Grossi said on Twitter Monday that the IAEA “will continue working tirelessly in addressing decommissioning, radioactive waste and environmental remediation related with Chernobyl accident.” Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl power plant 110 kilometers (65 miles) north of Ukraine’s capital Kyiv exploded and caught fire deep in the night on April 26, 1986, shattering the building and spewing radioactive material into the sky.

(snip)

Eventually, more than 100,000 people were evacuated from the vicinity and the 2,600-square-kilometer (1,000-square-mile) exclusion zone was established where the only activity was workers disposing of waste and tending to a hastily built sarcophagus covering the reactor. Radiation continued to leak from the reactor building until 2019, when the entire building was covered by an enormous arch-shaped shelter.

(snip)

https://apnews.com/article/kyiv-environment-and-nature-business-ukraine-nuclear-waste-44ca26330ad79c7b04de5c75e0f004b9

ETA - apparently in an effort to be completely independent of Russia for storage of their nuclear waste rods, they built this new storage facility on the grounds of Chernobyl so they can take all of the spent rods from all of their plants around the country, and store them there rather than ship them to Russia (for a cost) to store them.

[progree]

32. So this is saying they are storing relatively recent spent fuel from other UKR reactors

... that need circulating water cooling ... The only thing I'm having trouble picturing is how they transport those hot hot and getting hotter fuel rods from another plant to Chernobyl -- do they clear the roads and tell the truck drivers to drive fast? With the windows rolled down? Only in winter?

Edit - on 2nd thought, the latitude of Chernobyl is 51.3 deg, further north then even Minneapolis (45 deg). No need to wait til winter. No need for extraordinary cooling measures. The concern probably is that they will get so cold that they will become brittle and crumble

Oh, in that 3rd picture they are goose-stepping ... maybe there's something to that de-Nazification campaign after all

[BumRushDaShow]

34. Our DOE has a pic of a transport container for the rods

(from here - https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-common-myths-about-transporting-spent-nuclear-fuel)



The rods have the little uranium fuel pellets in them that are undergoing controlled fission where the cladding and other surrounding material, are capturing the extra particles (neutrons) so that you have a 1 to 1 reaction. The uranium gets broken apart upon getting hit with a neutron and eventually there is no more left (just the leftover elements that were created in the aftermath).

The pellets are inside the rods -



Typical pellet -



I remember back when I was in high school and my physics class took a trip to the then-under-construction Limerick Nuclear Power Plant about 30 miles outside of Philly, the guy from PECO who gave us the tour told us the simple point of it - the fission reaction causes heat that is used to boil water to create steam to turn a turbine to generate electricity. That's all it is.

Whether you use oil or gasoline or coal to ignite a heat source (e.g., flame) to boil water that will create the steam to turn the turbine to make electricity OR you use the heat from a nuclear reaction to do the same, you are in need of some heat source.

Per DOE - the two types we use are these -





(and in the top case, if you fix or reduce the volume and increase the pressure, you increase the temperature due to the ideal gas law, which has the pressure and temperature inversely proportional to volume)

As long as nothing is reacting in the rods, then they won't be hot and "spent" would be "nothing reacting".

(brain fried now calling up the 3 semesters of physics I had to take in college for my chem degree )

[progree]

35. Thanks! Yes, but the spent fuel has lots of fission products that decay for years , releasing heat

So the spent fuel rods are generating heat -- lots of heat -- initially, like ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat

Quantitatively, at the moment of reactor shutdown, decay heat from these radioactive sources is still 6.5% of the previous core power if the reactor has had a long and steady power history. About 1 hour after shutdown, the decay heat will be about 1.5% of the previous core power. After a day, the decay heat falls to 0.4%, and after a week, it will be only 0.2%.[2] Because radioisotopes of all half life lengths are present in nuclear waste, enough decay heat continues to be produced in spent fuel rods to require them to spend a minimum of one year, and more typically 10 to 20 years, in a spent fuel pool of water before being further processed. However, the heat produced during this time is still only a small fraction (less than 10%) of the heat produced in the first week after shutdown.[1]

So I'm wondering - if they require active cooling in spent fuel storage ponds after they arrive at Chernobyl, then heat removal must be an issue during transportation... ? But maybe not all that much I guess if they wait a year or so before transporting, and they drive fast

I was in the nuclear Navy in the 1970's after a year of nuclear power school - but I don't know any more than the average person about spent fuel storage or transportation issues.

[BumRushDaShow]

36. I expect the containment vessels are like an "insulator"

and are rated for a specific tolerance/operating range and as long as the conditions don't go outside that range (at least for too long), then they can still be considered "safe" but maybe at some "caution" state. The hope is that whoever is taking the readings and relaying them, is someone trustworthy (and not being coerced).

I was just reading the IAEA press releases (which are pretty informative) and things don't look promising (there was one issued today) - https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-16-iaea-director-general-statement-on-situation-in-ukraine

One of the big problems is that there is apparently some kind of communications system that remotely feeds data about the status of the plants, directly to IAEA's offices for monitoring, and those connections are cut off. So they are basically relying on the plant operator and staff to relay the info manually (under duress because the plant is occupied by enemy troops).

[progree]

6. IAEA says no critical impact on safety after power loss at Chernobyl - Reuters

IAEA says no critical impact on safety after power loss at Chernobyl, Reuters, 3/9/22

VIENNA — The loss of power at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine does not have any critical impact on safety, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said in a statement on Wednesday.

"Heat load of spent fuel storage pool and volume of cooling water at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant sufficient for effective heat removal without need for electrical supply," the IAEA said in a statement.

Short article, no more at link:
https://www.reuters.com/world/iaea-says-no-critical-impact-safety-after-power-loss-chernobyl-2022-03-09/

Edited to add - they might be cooling more recent fuel from other plants. See #13 for a statement from Energoaton, Ukraine's national nuclear energy company.

[gab13by13]

8. I read what they said, but why?

[progree]

11. I took a shot at it in #9 above /nt

[gab13by13]

16. Thanks

[Wicked Blue]

13. Energoatom explains the threat of Chornobyl de-energization

This is the full statement today from Energoaton, Ukraine's national nuclear energy company"

About 20,000 spent fuel assemblies are stored at the spent nuclear fuel storage facility-1. They need constant cooling, which is possible only in the presence of electricity.

Energoatom stated this.

If there is no power supply, the pumps will not cool down. As a result, the temperature in the holding pools will increase, soaring and release of radioactive substances into the environment will occur.

The wind can transfer the radioactive cloud to other regions of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and Europe.

Ventilation will also not work at the facility. All personnel there will receive a dangerous dose of radiation.

The fire extinguishing system also does not work, and this is a huge risk in the event of a fire that could occur due to a missile.

Fighting is currently underway, making it impossible to carry out repairs and restore power.

It is noted that the city of Slavutych is also without electricity.

https://rubryka.com/en/2022/03/09/energoatom-poyasnyv-chym-zagrozhuye-znestrumlennya-chaes/

Wikipedia:

Energoatom, full name National Nuclear Energy Generating Company of Ukraine (Ukrainian: НАЕК "Енергоатом&quot is a Ukrainian state enterprise operating all four nuclear power stations in Ukraine.

[TomWilm]

19. But IAEA is still OK with this, and they are the most trustworthy source right now

However, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that the cooling pools at the Chernobyl plant are "sufficient for effective heat removal without need for electrical supply," adding: "In this case IAEA sees no critical impact on safety."
https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-danger-chernobyl-iaea-no-critical-impact-safety/

[Roc2020]

14. Putin is laying groundwork

for a Nuke detonation. This is really happening in our world right now

[IronLionZion]

21. Russia doesn't care but Belarus might

since they would be getting some of the radiation.

The monitoring systems are down so authorities wouldn't know if there's a problem.

[PatrickforB]

22. Putin's invasion seems more and more ill advised as we go.

I don't know what kind of dumbasses are commanding the RU forces on the ground, but this is really, really, really stupid.

I visited Russia in the way back when, around '03, and was told that when the original Chernobyl explosion happened, they had orange rain as far east as the Volga River for months. They didn't tell us everything, either. The 'official' death toll was 31 people.

Sure.

However, the Russian Academy of Sciences indicates that there could have been as many as 830,000 people in the Chernobyl clean-up teams. They estimated that between 112,000 and 125,000 of these – around 15% – had died by 2005, and literally millions were exposed to radiation.

So...bad idea to play war around the nuclear power plant.

Really.

Bad.

Idea.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

33. Update on Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant:

Update on Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant:

750 kV ChNPP - Kyiv high-voltage line is currently disconnected due to the damage caused by the occupiers.

As a result, the Chernobyl station and all nuclear facilities in the Exclusion Zone are without electricity.

Link to tweet