Five technicians secured by wires worked near the curved top of an arched steel structure that loomed the equivalent of 40 stories high, trying to extinguish the last bits of smoldering insulation left by a drone strike. It was snowing; the temperature was below freezing; the steel was covered with ice.
The hole from the strike was quite large, about 540 square feet, and dangerous for many reasons — primarily because it jeopardized the safety of the protective shell covering Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history.
The breach was also deliberate, Ukrainian officials said, punched through at 1:59 a.m. on Friday by a Russian drone with a high-explosive warhead. Nuclear experts called it one of the most potentially dangerous attacks since Russia invaded Ukraine almost three years ago.
Despite the strike, radiation levels at Chernobyl remained normal on Friday. Far below that arched hood, the concrete-and-steel “sarcophagus” encasing the reactor and highly radioactive debris held. No one was injured or killed.
Still, Ukrainian authorities described the strike as audacious, hitting a nuclear power plant on the eve of a gathering of world leaders in Munich and risking a disaster.
The Kremlin denied that Russia’s military had struck the plant. Its spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, implied that it was some kind of fraud by the Ukrainians. “The Russian military does not do this,” he said.
Workers extinguished the fire early Friday, but insulation still burned as of the late afternoon, said Andriy Danyk, the head of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, as he stood in the median of a parking lot in front of Reactor No. 4. But the hole will take months to fix, he added, and it’s not yet clear all the work that has to be done for it to be to sealed.
“You have an amazing, terrible situation, because that’s not supposed to happen,” said Shaun Burnie, a senior nuclear specialist at Greenpeace who has monitored nuclear power plants in Ukraine since 2022 and who visited Chernobyl on Friday. “It was never designed for a deliberate military attack. We’ve been investigating Russian war crimes, and this looks like another one.”
On Friday, Ukrainian officials showed journalists bits of the drone they say hit the plant — a Shahed, typically deployed by Russia and stamped with the code of 15480. They displayed it near a radioactivity warning sign, as if to prove the seriousness of the attack.
An initial analysis by McKenzie Intelligence Services, a British consulting company, that was commissioned Friday by Greenpeace, said video footage showed some minor internal damage to the facility. The analysis also said that drone engine debris “is almost certainly” the remains of a piston engine that powers the Shahed drone, supplied by Iran to the Russians.
The analysis also said that the drone’s system is guided by preset coordinates for an intended target. “This would indicate the almost certain deliberate targeting” of the plant by the Russians, the analysis added.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine told journalists at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that the drone was flying at an altitude of about 278 feet, which is undetectable by radar.
“It wasn’t a case of the drone changing course or anything like that,” Mr. Zelensky said.
The $1.7 billion protective shell that was damaged was completed in 2019, built with the help of 45 countries to make sure that a nuclear accident like the one that occurred in 1986 would not happen here again.
The structure was an engineering feat, designed to seal in vast quantities of radioactive isotopes from the fire and meltdown in 1986 at Reactor No. 4. The hastily built sarcophagus was deteriorating, but the arched steel shell was intended to last generations. It was brought in on railway tracks, Mr. Burnie said, and at about 40,000 tons, is the largest movable man-made structure ever built.
Outside the entry checkpoint for Chernobyl, a yellow sign advertises the “Large Construction” program of Mr. Zelensky, proclaiming “Chernobyl — from the exclusion zone to the renaissance zone.”
More than a disaster area, much of the 1,000-square-mile Chernobyl exclusion zone, where access is strictly limited, resembles a storybook forest, with snowcapped pine trees and small villages. But the homes are abandoned; most are marked with signs saying how many people used to live there.
On Friday, military and police checkpoints stopped cars every few miles. A convoy of military trucks moved toward the plant. Two fire engines drove toward the exit.
At the plant itself, an unfinished reactor resembled an abandoned giant erector set. A billboard near Reactor No. 4 portrayed a large fire and urged people to call Ukraine’s 101 emergency number in case of a disaster.
Snow made it difficult to see much of anything at the plant. Fire trucks were parked in the lot near Reactor No. 4. Mr. Danyk said snow and icy surfaces made the emergency work much more dangerous, but workers hoped to fully extinguish the insulation by Friday night.
He added that the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Center was monitoring radiation levels nationwide. They remained normal.
“Our team is rotating constantly to ensure no one is exposed to radiation,” he said.
Oleksandr Tytarchuk, the chief engineer at the plant, said his team and other specialists plan to do a “preliminary analysis and temporarily seal the opening,” to prevent more moisture from entering the structure, which can speed corrosion. But this would not be a radiation-proof seal, meaning the shell would no longer serve the function it had before the strike.
“We understand that snow is falling, rain is expected and water used during fire suppression has also become radioactive waste,” Mr. Tytarchuk said. “That said, I must emphasize that the radiation levels have not increased and remain under control.”
Workers will then have to figure out a more permanent solution — one that didn’t appear obvious on Friday afternoon.
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