Temporary repairs are planned for 2026 to pave the way for permanent restoration, the UN agency said.
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The protective shield around the reactor at Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant was damaged by a drone, rendering the reactor no longer able to perform its main safety function, the nuclear power watchdog said.
A drone attack in February that Ukraine blames on Russia seriously damaged a steel structure built in 2019 to limit the release of radioactive material from a nuclear reactor destroyed in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency said in a Dec. 5 situation report. The IAEA said the airstrike caused a large fire.
IAEA officials recently completed a safety assessment of Chernobyl, concluding that the protective structure “has lost its primary safety function, including its containment function.”
According to the IAEA, temporary repairs are planned for 2026 to pave the way for permanent restoration.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in February that a Russian drone had damaged a protective shield, but that radiation levels remained normal after the accident. The Russian government denied any involvement, saying it did not attack nuclear infrastructure.
What happened at Chernobyl?
One of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was destroyed in an explosion on April 26, 1986. The disaster could have spread radioactivity as far away as Britain, rendering the surrounding area uninhabitable for thousands of years. At least 28 people died in this acute disaster, and thousands more died of cancer caused by radiation exposure.
A 20-mile radius around Chernobyl has been closed to human habitation, but outside the so-called “exclusion zone,” about 5 million people still live on contaminated land and hundreds of thousands have fallen ill.
The plant’s last reactor was shut down in 2000.
Contributor: Katie Vogel, USA TODAY. Reuters
