Vienna – SABA:
The Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Mariano Grossi, warned on Friday that the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine has lost all external power supply, describing the security situation there as “extremely dangerous.”
In a statement posted on the IAEA’s official X (formerly Twitter) account, Grossi said the plant suffered a complete outage of external electricity earlier in the day.
He noted that this marks the ninth blackout at the facility since the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, and the first such incident since the end of 2023.
“The plant is now operating on emergency diesel generators,” Grossi said, warning that this places nuclear safety in extreme jeopardy.
The Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant's press office announced that the plant has been completely disconnected from its external power supply, and that backup power generators are currently meeting the plant's needs.
In a statement issued on Friday, it indicated that the causes of the outage of the last of the two high-voltage lines, the Dneprovskaya line, at the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant are under investigation.
The statement confirmed that the Zaporizhia plant's equipment, which was left without an external power supply, is in safe condition, and that there have been no safety violations.
Kyiv forces continue to launch provocations and attempt to target the Zaporizhia plant and the surrounding area.
The nuclear power plant is located on the left bank of the Dnieper River near the town of Energodar. It is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe in terms of the number of reactors: six, each with a capacity of one gigawatt. In October 2022, ownership of the nuclear plant was transferred to Russia.
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