Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant

The plant's six reactors are shut down but still need power to cool their fuel, and for much of 2026 it has depended on a single 330kV line, Ferosplavna-1, after the main 750kV line went down on 24 March. When that line failed on 20 August, staff cut running generators from four to two and ran cooling pumps intermittently; by 29 August about ten days of diesel remained, the regulatory minimum.

A seventh local Ceasefire on 5 September let Ukrainian technicians demine the ground and repair the line, and power returned around 8 September. That left the plant on one connection again, the configuration that failed in August. By mid-July the IAEA had counted 22 losses of off-site power, ten of them in three months.

Attacks on the site moved closer to its safety systems in the summer. A drone strike on 30 June damaged the fire station that backs the plant's emergency response, significantly cutting its firefighting capacity, which IAEA inspectors confirmed on 1 July.

On 15 July a drone struck a vehicle at the EDGE of the site and killed chief engineer Alexander Yakovlev and his driver. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi condemned the attack without assigning blame. In late August inspectors logged three more impacts in one week, near the cooling pond and at the dry spent-fuel store and the sprinkler system.

Russia has used paperwork to entrench its hold on the plant. In early April its nuclear regulator, Rostekhnadzor, issued 10-year operating licences for units 1 and 2, committing Moscow to running the site under Russian law until 2036. Rosatom said the reactors cannot restart while fighting continues.

Ukraine's regulator and international nuclear bodies reject Rostekhnadzor's authority over a plant inside Ukrainian territory, so the licences are a claim any settlement must explicitly overturn. Meanwhile the plant's survival depends on IAEA-brokered local ceasefires, such as the one in April that allowed repairs to the backup line.