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This plant produces about half as much power as Zaporizhzhia and is located further west in the city of Yuzhnoukrainisk. Mr Kotin said Russian troops were about 20 miles from the facility in Southern Ukraine, but were already fighting Ukrainian forces on the way there.
Mr. Kotin says that the purpose of the Russian military to occupy the nuclear power plants may be to warn Ukrainians that their electricity will be cut off if they do not submit to the occupation. “If we don’t like them,” he said, they will threaten to “destroy our nuclear objects.” Another possibility, he added, was that capturing power plants would aid Russia’s plan to divide the country into manageable chunks: By controlling electricity production in the south, they could also control the south.
A darker possibility is related to the production of nuclear weapons.
On Wednesday, Mr. Grossi of the IAEA from work Russia has claimed that Ukraine is trying to obtain atomic weapons, saying its agency’s surveillance over the nation shows that Kiev’s nuclear program is completely peaceful. But Russia may be motivated, in part, to seize Ukraine’s nuclear power plants to gather atomic material for itself or to close a possible and difficult path for Kiev to obtain nuclear weapons.
Plutonium is one of the two main fuels used in the cores of atomic bombs. Mr. Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security said spent fuel at the Zaporizhzhia facility could, in theory, fuel up to 3,000 warheads if properly treated.
Although plutonium from reactors is not considered a high-grade weapons fuel, during the Cold War the United States conducted studies and tests that showed it could be used. He went so far in 1962 that successfully tested A nuclear bomb made of reactor-grade plutonium.
The Russians also mined bomb material from reactor plutonium during the nuclear age, and experts say they feared that Ukrainians might one day, in theory, learn the dark art. Such a scenario would entail a major failure of the IAEA, which is focused on ensuring that no operator of a peaceful nuclear power plant anywhere on the planet tries to surreptitiously extract plutonium from spent fuel for nuclear weapons.
Valerie Hopkins reported from Lviv, Ukraine and William J. Broad from New York. Maria Varenikova, Farnaz Fassihi, Marc Santora and Christoph Koettl contributing reporting.
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