The IAEA cannot monitor safety at the occupied Zaporizhzhia NPP

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has too few inspectors at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, so they cannot properly monitor safety at Ukraine’s Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), which has been seized by Russian forces.

This is stated in the report of the Greenpeace organization, which was sent to Western governments on September 28 of this year.

An environmental campaign group has concluded that the International Atomic Energy Agency has too few inspectors at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant – only four – despite the fact that their access is heavily restricted by Russian forces.

The Greenpeace report also claims that the IAEA is “failing to meet the requirements of its mandate,” but the Agency is unwilling to admit this publicly. As a result of the Russians’ violation of the station’s security principles, which are recorded by IAEA specialists, they are not exposed.

“The IAEA risks normalizing what remains a dangerous nuclear crisis, unprecedented in the history of nuclear power, while exaggerating its actual impact on events on the ground,” said Greenpeace nuclear experts Sean Burney and Jan Vande Putte.

Greenpeace’s findings are complemented by an open-source military assessment written by McKenzie Intelligence. Most of the Russian troops and defense assets at the facility are likely hidden, and inspectors report evidence that some areas of the station are mined, although it is unclear how heavily.

At the same time, based on data from satellite images, analysts said there was evidence that the Russians had built firing points on the roof of four reactor halls. Traces, also discovered from above, show that the invaders regularly launch “Hail” or “Smerch” MLRS at Ukrainian targets from various points at a distance of 1 to 18 km from the plant.

As Bernie and Vande Putte point out, the Russian military is also likely to “use the proximity of the nuclear power plant as a shield” to contain counter-battery fire. And they emphasize that this is a violation of the five security principles of the IAEA, announced by its Director General Rafael Grossi at the meeting of the UN Security Council in May of this year.

The IAEA refused to directly comment on the Greenpeace report, but emphasized that inspectors have been in place since September 2022, and without their presence “the world would not have an independent source of information about Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.

All six of its reactors are shut down, according to the IAEA, and concerns over whether there is enough cooling water after Russian forces breached the Novaya Kakhovka dam below in June have been eased by the drilling of new wells.