The Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that shelling and fire destroyed an external radiation monitoring system last week, the head of the agency said in a press release.
ZNPP supposedly lost connection to the monitoring station June 24, a few days after losing power for 16 hours, and could not access the station — located 16 kilometers southwest of the plant — due to the “security situation” in Ukraine, the press release said. Since early 2022, when the war in Ukraine began following Russia’s invasion, radiation monitoring stations within 30 kilometers of ZNPP have been out of service for varying time periods, and four out of 14 are currently unavailable.
“The functioning of off-site radiation monitoring equipment is an essential part of nuclear safety around the world,” IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said. “The loss of one radiation monitoring station does not have a direct impact on safety at the ZNPP, but it forms part of a continuous erosion of a range of safety measures during the war that remains a deep source of concern.”
Nuclear weapons testing could return to the ballot in November in a “dangerous vestige of the past,” the head of the Arms Control Association said in an op-ed in the organization’s monthly journal Arm’s Control Today.
Daryl Kimball, head of ACA and contributor to the journal, argued in the article that Former president Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien’s op-ed in Foreign Affairs to resume nuclear testing under a possible new Donald Trump administration was “technically and militarily unnecessary.”
The head of the National Nuclear Security Administration was scheduled to meet with diplomats in July to discuss the current regime of U.S. nuclear weapons tests, which the agency says produce no nuclear yield.
Research.com named 14 scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in their 2024 Best Environmental Scientists ranking, according to a post by the lab on the website X.
The climate researchers at LLNL specialize in modeling the climate system to support assessing national security infrastructure’s resilience to climate change, according to the lab’s description of the climate science focus area.
