Fires in the Chernobyl area but no risk of contamination

The Inspectorate for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection - ISIN, through the international channels of which it is a reference point for our country, has learned that in recent days there have been fires in the "exclusion zone" around the Chernobyl power plant.

The Ukrainian Regulatory Authority (SNRIU) has assessed, based on several years of experience with such fires, as well as on the basis of soil contamination in the exclusion zone, how low the radiological risk caused by such fires and the IAEA agrees with this assessment.

The Exclusion Zone Management Agency reported that one of its laboratories was ransacked and its equipment stolen. The IAEA has assessed that the event does not pose a significant radiological risk.
Furthermore, according to the SNRIU, the Russian military continues to ignore the radiation protection regulations and the access control procedures in the facilities and in the exclusion zone, causing a deterioration of the local radiological situation.

The situation in the other Ukrainian plants remains unchanged and therefore under control overall, albeit always taking into account that these plants are located in a war zone.

ISIN continues monitoring h. 24 of the situation in Ukraine thanks to the connections with the international network and of the national situation thanks to the two detection networks active in our country, the environmental radioactivity surveillance network (Resorad), and the automatic monitoring network for early warning signals. Since the beginning of the war and up to now there have been no anomalies attributable to the events in Ukraine in the surveys of the two networks, as well as no radiometric anomalies have been reported to date by the other European environmental radioactivity monitoring laboratories.