“We cannot let our guard down. We must remain vigilant until the conflict ends or enters a phase in which there are no active hostilities,” the IAEA director general said.
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The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, called on Wednesday for constant vigilance when he visits the Ukrainian nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia, controlled by Russia since the beginning of the war, in 2022.
“We cannot let our guard down”We must remain in a state of constant vigilance until the conflict ends or enters a phase in which there are no active hostilities,” Grossi said, as quoted by the Russian news agency TASS.
In the case of Zaporizhia, he added, “it cannot be ruled out that something serious could happen.”
The head of the UN specialized agency. He again avoided accusing one of the parties of bombing the central facilitiesstating only that the IAEA provides “up-to-date information on what is happening” and that “people can draw their own conclusions.”
The head of the nuclear power plant, Yuri Chernichuk, said he was confident that the attacks would cease after Grossi’s visit.
“We are waiting for the most important thing, which is to guarantee the safety of the plant. That is what we want most. We want there to be no bombings in the central area and we want Mr. Grossi to contribute to this as much as possible,” he said.
Meanwhile, the head of Russian nuclear power company Rosatom, Alexei Likhachev, called on the IAEA to “not tell half the truth” when commenting on reports of bombings at the plant and the city where it is located.
This is Grossi’s fifth visit to the Zaporizhia plant in the past two years.days after travelling to the Russian region of Kursk, the scene of a Ukrainian military operation, to inspect the local atomic plant.
After his first inspection of the plant, Grossi warned on Tuesday of the possibility of a second Chernobyl, a site that was the scene of the worst nuclear disaster in history in 1986.
“We find it very serious that a plant of this type is so close to a battle front””Grossi told the international press at the end of his inspection visit to the plant, whose reactor, he says, is very exposed to a possible attack.
Source: Observadora
