Where is the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant?

EUROPE'S biggest nuclear power plant has been attacked by Russian forces in Ukraine.

Eight days after Russia's invasion, troops fired on Zaporizhzhia, leading to fears that radiation rises could cause another Chernobyl disaster.

Where is the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant?

Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is situated in south-eastern Ukraine, 350 miles from the capital Kyiv, on the banks of the Dnieper River.

It is about 124 miles from the contested Donbas region.

Russian forces attacked the plant in the early hours of Friday, March 4. 2022, causing a fire at the nuclear facility.

Ukrainians formed a human barricade in front of the plant to prevent Russian troops seizing it.

This comes over a week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, with Putin's forces storming the Chernobyl reactor. 

In a video message, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy branded Russia’s attack on the Zaporizhzhia power plant “nuclear terror” and accused Moscow of aiming to “repeat” the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

He said: “No country other than Russia has ever fired on nuclear power units."

Ukrainian foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba issued a stark warning via Twitter: “If it blows up, it will be 10 times larger than Chornobyl!

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"Russians must IMMEDIATELY cease the fire, allow firefighters, establish a security zone!”

In an interview with Times Radio, Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab described Russia's attack and the capture of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as “clearly reckless” and “an affront to the world at large”.

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But despite fears that there could be another major nuclear catastrophe, Ukrainian officials maintain that radiation levels are not rising.

According to a tweet from the International Atomic Agency there is "no change reported in radiation levels at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant site".

How big is the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant?

Zaporizhzhia is the largest nuclear facility of its kind in Europe and ninth largest in the world.

It has six VVER-1000 pressurised light water nuclear reactors.

The plant supplies Ukraine with a fifth of its electrical energy.

The six reactors generate a net capacity of 5,700 megawatts (MW) and gross capacity of 6,000MW, a larger nuclear output than both Chernobyl and Fukushima Daichii, but smaller output than Japan's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant.

What happened in Chernobyl?

On April 26, 1986, a nuclear reactor exploded during a safety test at the Chernobyl power plant in Pripyat, Soviet Ukraine.

The blast was the equivalent of 500 nuclear bombs.

Dangerously high radiation levels led to the creation of a 30km wide exclusion zone with over 350,000 people being evacuated from their homes.

The disaster led to at least immediate deaths, but has been linked to thousands of radiation-related cancer cases across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.

An 18-mile radius known as the “Exclusion Zone” was set up around the reactor following the disaster.

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