Kyiv, Ukraine – While urging Kyiv to give away its nuclear power plants to Washington, United States President Donald Trump may have forgotten one of the scariest words to ever come out of Ukraine.
Chernobyl, a synonym of the world’s worst nuclear disaster.
The 1986 explosion at the nuclear power plant in then-Soviet Ukraine was hundreds of times mightier than the two atomic bombs Washington dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The Chernobyl blast rocketed red-hot, highly irradiated graphite and dust, making parts of the cordoned-off “exclusion zone” around the shutdown plant unfit for human habitation for tens of thousands of years.
If it was not for thousands of servicemen and emergency workers who prevented a much bigger bang of Reactor Four, where uranium fuel rods melted into a giant “elephant foot”, most of Eastern Europe would have been similarly uninhabitable.
“For three months, I couldn’t get up, I could barely eat,” one of the workers, 69-year-old Volodymyr Robovyk, told Al Jazeera earlier this month, describing the health consequences he suffered.
What have the US and Ukraine said?
During a phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday, Trump said the best way for Kyiv to protect its four nuclear power plants is to give them away to the US.
“American ownership of those plants could be the best protection for that infrastructure,” Trump said.
Trump added that Washington could be “very helpful in running those plants with its electricity and utility expertise”.
Zelenskyy soon clarified that he and Trump “only talked about one power plant that is under Russian occupation”.
He meant the Zaporizhzhia plant in southeastern Ukraine, Europe’s largest nuclear facility that once generated a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity.
Russia occupied it in 2022, and all of its six reactors have been put into “cold shutdown” that stops energy generation and curbs the risk of an explosion.
However, Kyiv is not going to turn the Zaporizhzhia plant over to Washington.
“If they want to take it from the Russians, invest in it, modernise it, that’s another matter,” Zelenskyy told a news conference on Thursday while on a state visit to Norway. “We’re not talking about the change of ownership.”
What do Ukrainians fear?
Many Ukrainians wonder whether there is any danger of a Russian provocation, such as an explosion if and when Ukraine tries to take over the plant after Trump’s suggestion.
“Of course, there is such danger,” Ihor Romanenko, who served as deputy head of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces, told Al Jazeera.
He compared the possibility to the June 2023 blast that destroyed the Nova Kakhovka dam, which once provided a crucial water supply to the Zaporizhzhia plant.
Kyiv accused Moscow of blowing up the dam, calling it a “war crime” and “ecocide”.
Romanenko said Trump is abusing Ukraine’s dire military and financial straits to take over the plant – and that Kyiv may sue Washington to get them back in the future.
“Our memory works fine,” he said. “We remember everything that belongs to Ukraine and will fight for what is ours.”
However, a former Zaporizhzhia plant staffer dissuaded his concerns about the possibility of a Russian provocation.
“I don’t think that in this situation [the Russians] will resort to deliberately damaging the station’s parts, because the station is a subject of negotiations and haggling,” a former engineer who fled the plant in 2023, but still maintains ties with former colleagues, told Al Jazeera.
“The better its condition is the higher is the price they will get when they’re swapping it for something – if they’re swapping it,” the engineer said on condition of anonymity.
What’s the mood at the Zaporizhzhia plant?
The engineer said former colleagues who agreed to collaborate with Rosatom, the Kremlin-controlled nuclear monopoly that manages the plant, were worried about Trump’s proposal.
But after realising that Washington did not announce the use of its military force to retake the plant, the collaborators feel elated.
“There are these mood swings,” the engineer said.
Rosatom has long pledged to relocate them to Russia or to the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant Russia is building in southeastern Turkiye in case Ukraine retakes the Zaporizhzhia plant.
And there is always a risk of negligence on the part of Russian servicemen guarding the plant.
In 2023, Al Jazeera published an exclusive report about the ethnic Chechen guards in Enerhodar, the plant’s company town.
They ignored safety measures, installing fences and machineguns inside the plant and seeing it as a “big concrete construction one can hide behind”, a former plant staffer said.
If their negligence results in damage to one of the reactors or spent fuel storage facilities, an explosion similar to a “dirty” atomic bomb could occur – and spew a radioactive cloud over Ukraine and parts of Eastern Europe, another staffer told Al Jazeera.
What’s the role of Ukraine’s nuclear plants?
Before 2022, Ukraine’s four nuclear power plants generated almost half of the nation’s electricity.
Their role was especially crucial after Kyiv lost access to coal mines in the southeastern Donbas region.
Since 2022, Moscow has been shelling Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, and Putin tentatively agreed to stop hitting it only earlier this week.
Shortly after Trump’s idea was announced, US Secretary for Energy Chris Wright told Fox News that his agency has “immense technical expertise” to run them.
“I don’t think that requires boots on the ground,” he said.
Wright has a background in engineering and natural gas. He may not be the best expert on how to operate Soviet-era reactors.
They run on Rosatom-manufactured uranium rods, but in 2005, Kyiv chose to replace them with fuel from Westinghouse, a Pittsburg-based nuclear energy giant.
Seven years later, Westinghouse fuel damaged protective envelopes in two reactors of the South Ukrainian power station.
Rosatom experts were called in to remove the rods, prompting Putin to announce that they “solved complex technical problems”.
Westinghouse redesigned the rods, and no further incidents were reported.
What are the wider concerns about the plants?
International observers are also concerned about Ukraine’s ageing reactors.
Bankwatch, a Prague-based environmentalist group, called them “zombie reactors” and urged Kyiv to shut them down.
However, Petro Kotin, head of Energoatom, Ukraine’s nuclear energy monopoly, told Al Jazeera in 2021 that Bankwatch “manipulated facts” and that his agency succeeded in extending the reactors’ lifespan.
There are also widespread concerns about alleged corruption at Energoatom amid non-transparent deals and the procurement of cheap spare parts.
“They get crazy kickbacks. This is a team of marauders,” Olga Kosharna, a nuclear safety expert, told Al Jazeera in 2021.
What if there is “an equipment failure if you bought the wrong spare part?” she said.
