UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned a recent attack on a nuclear power station in southern Ukraine during a meeting in Tokyo on Monday with the Japan National Press Club.
“Any attack to nuclear plants is…suicidal,” the UN chief said, adding that he hoped that the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would be able to access the plant for inspection.
Both Moscow and Kyiv have denied responsibility for the strike on the Zaporizhzhia plant over the weekend.
While Europe’s largest nuclear power site has been under Russian control since the early days of the war, Ukrainian technicians are still running it.
Energoatom, Ukraine’s nuclear power plant operator, said that Russian shelling damaged three radiation monitors around the storage facility for spent nuclear fuels, in which one worker was injured.
The shelling prompted IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi to warn that the way in which Zaporizhzhia was being run coupled with the fighting around it posed “the very real risk of a nuclear disaster”.
Since then, a preliminary assessment by UN atomic overseer experts found that the safety and security situation seemed stable with no immediate threat, despite that several pillars were breached. Läs artikel