The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) lost off-site power for the 22nd time since 2022 in mid-July, with ten of those failures in the last three months, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported1. ZNPP is Europe's largest nuclear facility, Russian-occupied since 2022 and in cold shutdown, but its spent fuel and containment systems still need continuous external power. The IAEA is the UN nuclear watchdog whose inspectors have been on-site throughout.
A thunderstorm knocked out the plant's sole surviving backup, the 330kV Ferosplavna-1 line. The main 750kV Dniprovska line has stayed down since May, when a substation more than 100km away was damaged, so the station now depends on a single cable exposed to the weather. Off-site power runs the cooling pumps, and each disconnection forces the plant onto diesel generators whose fuel and reliability are finite.
Ten disconnections in three months against a multi-year baseline mark a sharp acceleration, and they come three weeks after a drone killed ZNPP's chief engineer as Enerhodar, the city that hosts the plant, lost power and water. The frequency of failure, rather than any single outage, is what the IAEA reads as the danger. The plant sits in shutdown condition, which limits the consequences of any one blackout, but every additional day on a single line narrows the margin between a controlled diesel run and an uncontrolled one.
