Welcome back to Turner's news rep. I'm ken buffa
. So Russian troops have seized the biggest nuclear power
plant in europe today. After shelling it in the
middle of the night, the International Atomic Energy Agency
said a projectile hit a training center and not any
of its six reactors. Thank goodness. Now Ukrainian
president Vladimir Zelinsky says an explosion at the Zaporizhia facility
will be catastrophic for the entire continent. Take a
look now, Zielinski is urging europe to take action
to prevent a massive nuclear disaster. Joining me now
is joe Cirincione nuclear expert and Quincy Institute Distinguished fellow
. The fire is at this power plant has been
reportedly contained and officials, they say that no radiation
was released. But how concerned are you now that
Russians have seized control of the power plant and how
dangerous this attack was? Well, we dodged a
nuclear bullet last night, but that's no guarantee that
we're going to dodge it again tonight or tomorrow,
or when Russia starts to seize the other 14 nuclear
power plants that that Ukraine has. I'm with the
director general of the Iaea, the International Atomic Energy
Agency. He says that he is extremely concerned and
that this Russian attack is a severe risk and that
Russia clearly violated the fundamental principle of preserving the integrity
of nuclear power plants. No country in the world
has ever done this in the history of the nuclear
age, no one has ever attacked a nuclear reactor
, Not in the Middle East, not in europe
, not in Asia. Never for obvious reasons if
it's one thing, if you want to take the
plant, turn it off, terrorize the Ukrainian people
cut their electricity, have them freeze in in this
winter. It's another thing to go shoot live rounds
into a nuclear plant to launch flares into the nuclear
plant. Now many people will point out to you
that this plant is surrounded by a very strong containment
vessel, reinforced concrete. And that's true. And
there are lots of safety measures in the plant.
That's true. But no nuclear power plant is designed
to withstand artillery, tank rounds or worse, the
cutting off of electricity. The Fukushima disaster of 2011
. The earthquake then didn't damage the structure. What
it did was knocked out the electricity and then the
tsunami came in and knocked out the backup electricity.
That meant that the water couldn't be pumped in to
cool the fuel rods and that led to three meltdowns
at the Fukushima reactors. The same could happen here
or at a future reactor that the Russians might seize
. So, I'm with the director general of the
Iaea A this is a horrific act were at severe
risk of a major environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. Russia
is forcing the engineers to work at gunpoint. Okay
, so operating a nuclear reactor in the best of
circumstances is tricky business, but at gunpoint. Yeah
, we should all be very, very worried about
what's going on in Ukraine in general, but at
the nuclear facilities In particular. Now we've been reading
that explosion at this facility could be 10 times worse
than Chernobyl. If this does blow up, how
bad will it be? And for whom? I
actually don't think it's that bad. Which is obviously
catastrophic. Chernobyl was the worst nuclear accident in history
and this plant is twice the size twice the megawatts
of the Chernobyl reactor. But that was an old
, deeply flawed soviet design. This is a better
designed kind of reactor. There are more safety protocols
in here. No, I think you're probably looking
at something like Fukushima. So when the water stops
circulating Fukushima and the fuel rods heated up to a
tremendous point, they melted, you had meltdowns that
meant the court, the melted uh uranium went right
through the floor of the reactor into the earth and
you had contamination go into the groundwater and spread throughout
the area. That way, you also had a
build up of hydrogen gas in the reactor vessels which
led to three hydrogen gas explosions. You could see
that kind of thing that would vent gasses into the
atmosphere. I have tremendous admiration for President Zelensky,
but he may be overstating it. It's not beyond
the realm of possibility that you could get something of
that consequence. It's just that it's likely would be
a lesser, but still catastrophic nuclear incident. So
there are three other nuclear plants in Ukraine that Russia
seems to be targeting to takeover. Why are they
targeting these plants if in fact they are so dangerous
. Yeah, mainly this is part of their effort
to terrorize the Ukrainian people to to bludgeon them into
submission. And so they would like to control.
And this is pretty standard military strategy. You seize
the critical nodes. So this is the electric supply
of the nation. You seize it. You know
, you want to seize the communication channels etcetera etcetera
. So that's what they're doing. It's just that
this isn't a coal plant. This isn't solar panels
. You know, if you blow up a coal
plant, okay, it's it's terrible but it doesn't
spread cold dust all through europe. You damage a
nuclear facility, You lied to meltdown or explosion at
a nuclear facility. You are looking at plumes of
radio activity going for hundreds of thousands of square kilometers
including into Russia. So I think it's part of
the clumsy barbaric style of warfare that you see Russia
practicing here. Look at what they're doing to the
city's, look at what they're doing to the business
centers. Look at what they're doing to military centers
. You think the nuclear are exempt from that?
No, I'm afraid that that this is going to
get worse before it gets better. It's not like
tank commanders know how to run a nuclear power plant
or the political officers with the Russian army know how
to run a nuclear power plant. This is this
is horrific. I've heard people downplaying the risk today
, including our own officials. I just heard the
undersecretary of energy saying it's no big deal. It
was never in risk of a meltdown. But I'm
more with our U. N. Ambassador who said
that we just we just escaped a nuclear disaster.
I'm with the director of the I. E.
A. There's a severe risk here. We should
be worried about this. It's not about nuclear power
in general. Although nuclear stocks may suffer from this
. It's about what the Russians are doing right now
to nuclear plants in Ukraine. It is outrageous.
There are international conventions against this. Russia has been
a signatory to those conventions. It's it's yet another
international norm, international law that Russia is violating and
it could carry with it the risk of a real
nuclear nightmare, joe. Cirincione ijo. I'm with
you. I think this is very serious stuff as
well. Nuclear expert in Quincy Institute, distinguished fellow
joe. I appreciate you coming on the show and
showing us how important this really is. Thank you 00:07:36.740 --> again.