Its general manager International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA, IAEA) sounded the alarm again today after Russia’s strike on its Ukrainian nuclear power plant Zaporozhye (southern Ukraine), which now only works with backup generators.

“Every time we play with fire, and if we let this situation continue, one day the luck will not be in our favor,” Rafael Grossi warned today before the board of directors of the UN agency in Vienna.

The head of the IAEA, who has been holding months of fruitless consultations with Kiev and Moscow on establishing a buffer zone around the nuclear power plant, called on the international community to respond.

“We must commit ourselves to protecting the safety of the station, and we must commit ourselves now,” he said, expressing his “surprise” at the current passivity. “What are we doing to prevent” an accident at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, he asked.

The IAEA has a team of experts at the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which has been taken over by the Russian military and is regularly bombed.

The power supply to the station was cut “around 05:00 am” for the first time since November and the sixth since the start of the war due to what Kiev said were Russian missile strikes, the IAEA said.

20 emergency generators have been activated and their reserves allow them to operate for about 15 days.

Electricity is needed to operate the pumps that circulate the water, since the fuel in the cores of the reactors must be constantly cooled, as well as the water in the spent fuel pools, in order to avoid a thermonuclear accident and the release of radioactivity into the environment.

^{Source: APE-MEB, AFP.}