Beyond Nuclear warned today that the recklessness of US and Israeli air attacks on Iran, which now threaten to potentially destroy the Bushehr commercial nuclear power plant there, represents a radiation risk of enormous proportions.
The 1,000-megawatt VVER reactor built by Russia is located on the Iranian coast. It is the same design as the reactors in Ukraine, where the International Atomic Energy Agency and other international authorities had previously raised an alarm, in case any of them were bombed or seriously damaged by Russian missiles as the war in Ukraine continued.
But there has been much less international comment on similar risks at Bushehr, a worrying trend as the US president abandons all war standards and protocols and threatens to destroy all of Iran’s critical infrastructure including power plants by midnight Tuesday if a deal is not reached with Iran by then.
“Striking the civilian nuclear power plant in Bushehr would be a war crime,” said Linda Bentz Gunther, executive director of Beyond Nuclear. “The Geneva Convention specifically defines a war crime as including striking facilities that, if damaged or destroyed, would result in massive loss of life to non-combatants,” Bentz-Günther added. “A commercial nuclear power plant certainly falls into this category.”
The particular risks at Bushehr stem from the highly radioactive uranium fuel inside the reactor and stored in cooling ponds and drums on site. Any extended loss of power due to an attack or direct hit can cause the fuel to overheat and ignite, potentially resulting in explosions. The resulting radioactive releases would lead to long-term radioactive fallout affecting vast areas in Iran, neighboring countries and beyond, contaminating agricultural lands as well as seawater, an essential source of drinking water in a region that relies on desalination.
The Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, called for restraint, citing the “seven indispensable pillars” he has established to try to discourage attacks on nuclear power plants.
“Secretary Grossi is ignoring two key factors,” Bentz-Guenther said. “The first is that the IAEA is actively promoting the use and expansion of nuclear energy around the world, so the IAEA must take responsibility for its role given the extreme danger we find ourselves in, first in Ukraine and now in Iran, with nuclear plants involved in the war. Second, the Seven Pillars make an assumption that we can now realize is completely untrustworthy – that the world leaders who are expected to adhere to these protocols are sane and rational.
“Grossi is literally clinging to his pillars like a barrel-man hanging from the mast of a storm-tossed ship about to hit the rocks as his tell-tale cries fade away into the chaos around him,” Bentz-Gunter said.
Nuclear meltdowns deposit radioactive contamination where the wind blows, and it falls as precipitation during rainfall. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power disaster created a 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone that remains too radioactively contaminated for human habitation today.
Japan experienced a triple meltdown in March 2011, when three of the four Fukushima Daiichi reactors exploded. The long gestation period for some diseases caused by continuous exposure to radiation means that the true health consequences of this disaster, whether deaths or debilitating diseases, will not be known for many years.
“Raising the possibility of another Chernobyl or Fukushima accident in the Middle East is criminally irresponsible,” Bentz-Günther concluded. “And although we know that the Iranian nuclear facilities were merely a pretext for a US-Israeli attack, we must remember that it was President Trump during his first term who effectively tore up the fully effective nuclear inspection and verification agreement – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – that ensured Iran remained within the bounds of a civilian nuclear program. Preserving the JCPOA was the sensible way to keep those nuclear safeguards in place.”
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