The Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Mariano Grossi, today met with Alexey Likhachev, Director General of Russian state nuclear company Rosatom, and other senior Russian officials in Istanbul.
Director General Grossi said he was continuing timely and professional discussions where he stressed the urgency of ensuring the safety of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (NPP). The IAEA is ready to play its indispensable role, he added.
Ukraine separately informed the IAEA today that there had been no significant developments related to nuclear safety and security in the country over the past 24 hours.
Regarding the country’s 15 operational reactors at four nuclear power plants, Ukraine said seven are currently connected to the grid, including two at?the Zaporizhzhya NPP, two at the Rivne NPP, two at the South Ukraine NPP, and one at the Khmelnytskyy NPP. The eight other reactors are shut down for regular maintenance or held in reserve. Safety systems remain operational at the four NPPs, and they also continue to have off-site power available, Ukraine said.
In relation to safeguards, following last week’s visit of IAEA inspectors and technicians to the Chornobyl NPP, data from all unattended monitoring systems installed at the site has now been fully recovered. Also, as a result of the deployment of new transmission channels based on satellite technologies, the remote transfer of the safeguards data to the Agency’s Vienna headquarters has been fully restored with the exception of one facility for which technical work is still required. The transmission from Chornobyl had been interrupted for two months. For the other NPPs in Ukraine, remote data continues to be transferred to the IAEA.