The new risks posed by nuclear facilities in war zones, and how to reduce them

Nuclear power plants are designed to operate safely, but not to find themselves in a war zone. Despite international agreements to exclude nuclear power plants from war zones, Russia has recklessly attacked these facilities in Ukraine. With the Russia-Ukraine war, nuclear power plants have become a new instrument for making war, either by threatening to attack them or by using them as a shield to conduct military activities. A focal point of concern has been the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine–one of the 10 biggest nuclear plants in the world and Europe’s largest–which Russian forces shelled and seized in March of last year. Experts have said a disaster at the Zaporizhzhia plant could come from the combination of a loss of external power, human error, and military mistake. These concerns prompted the International Atomic Energy Agency to mount a support and assistance mission–the riskiest mission of the agency’s history–in September 2022. Nuclear safety experts offered advice on how to avoid a major accident at the embattled plant. But others warned that the deteriorating working and living conditions at the plant occupied by Russian forces could nevertheless thrust the plant into a disaster. These concerns have also prompted international law experts and scholars to propose revising the current nuclear security regime to better protect nuclear facilities during wartime. Using the example of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, this talk will give an overview of the type of vulnerabilities nuclear facilities can face during wartime. The various legal measures proposed for their protection and existing points of disagreement will also be discussed.

This talk is co-sponsored by the University of Illinois Physics Department.