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By Ellie Cook
Senior Defense Reporter
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The United Nations' nuclear watchdog said backup generators had kicked in at two nuclear power plants in Ukraine in the past week, including at the decommissioned Chernobyl site, after months of punishing Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure.
Dips in the electrical grid automatically triggered the emergency diesel generators to power safety systems at "several facilities" within the roughly 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone around Chernobyl in northern Ukraine, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts said on Saturday.
Meanwhile, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) in southern Ukraine was cut off from all off-site power for more than 12 hours last weekend, the watchdog said. This caused four emergency diesel generators to start powering essential safety systems at the ZNPP, before dropping down to two to save fuel, the IAEA said.
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Fears over a nuclear disaster have stalked Ukraine since Russia started its full-scale invasion of its neighbor in February 2022.
Despite being the country most scarred by the 1986 Chernobyl accident—the world's worst-ever nuclear disaster—Ukraine has long been one of the top consumers of nuclear-generated electricity.
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But Moscow's persistent attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure, like its thermal plants, have forced the country to rely even more on its three remaining working nuclear power plants.
"It would be difficult for me to overstate my concern about the electrical grid in Ukraine and its impact on nuclear safety," IAEA chief, Rafael Grossi, said in a statement.
"These concerns are only further exacerbated as temperatures continue to fall and winter takes hold," Grossi said.
Waves of Russian assaults on Ukraine's power plants, electrical substations and transmission lines have triggered frequent blackouts across the country and exposed Ukrainian households to freezing temperatures as the austere winter conditions set in.
Russia says its attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure are in retaliation for Ukraine's operations and are intended to harm Ukraine's war campaign.
Kyiv has homed in on Russian oil refineries to cut off the Kremlin from income sources feeding its war effort. Russia is a major oil exporter and relies on the revenue to keep its economy going, especially because it dedicates so much of government spending to the military.
Ukraine's President, Volodymyr Zelensky, said earlier this month a Russian strike had targeted substations connecting the Ukrainian capital city and other parts of central Ukraine to the Rivne and Khmelnytskyi nuclear power plants. A third facility, the South Ukraine NPP, is still generating electricity for Ukraine.
Russian forces seized control of the ZNPP in southern Ukraine after taking the nearby town of Enerhodar in March 2022.
Ukrainian operators still manned the site, which has remained close to the front line in the south. International experts and officials have frequently raised concerns about the risk of a nuclear accident at the Zaporizhzhia plant from the exchange of fire, while Russia and Ukraine have blamed one another for endangering the facility.
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Before the start of the war, the ZNPP is thought to have generated more than a fifth of Ukraine's energy. It is Europe's largest nuclear power plant but hasn't generated electricity for Ukraine's grid for more than four years.
The IAEA said on Saturday the ZNPP had lost access to off-site power for the 27th time since the start of the full-scale war, and the ZNPP has relied on just one off-site power line for most of the year.
Although it's not currently operational, the six-reactor plant needs access to off-site power to keep it safe.
Several site workers have been killed in separate incidents, according to reports.
The Russian authorities in control of the ZNPP said on Wednesday one of its employees had been killed in their home, less than a week after claiming another plant worker had been killed by a drone while traveling to the ZNPP.
Russian officials had said on November 3 two people, including one ZNPP employee, had been killed when a drone struck their vehicle.
Ukraine has not commented but denied involvement in a reported drone strike that Russia said killed a chief engineer at the ZNPP in July.
The IAEA said its teams at the Khmelnytskyy and Rivne nuclear plants were forced to repeatedly take shelter in recent days because of military activity around the sites.
More than two dozen drones were detected around the South Ukraine nuclear power plant, including one just 350 meters from the site, the IAEA added. A total of 91 drones were reported around Chernobyl.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Tobias Meyjes and Trevor Davies
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