WPL@$30, page-5467

Snippet of real danger now at Ukraine

"The two incidents highlight the risk that facilities with radioactive material may suffer damage during the armed conflict, with potentially severe consequences," he said.James Acton, the co-director of the Nuclear Policy Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the simple key to keeping the facilities safe was to immediately end any military operations around them."Under normal circumstances, the likelihood of a reactor losing power and of the emergency diesel generators being damaged and of not being repaired adequately quickly is very, very small," Acton said."But in a war, all of these different failures that would have to happen for a reactor to become damaged and melt down — the likelihood of all of those happening becomes much more likely than it does in peacetime."Mitsuru Fukuda, a professor at Nihon University in Tokyo and expert on crisis management and security, said the Zaporizhzhia attack raises broader questions for all countries."Many of us did not expect a respected country's military would take such an outrageous step," he said. "Now that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin has done it, not only Ukraine but the international community, including Japan, should re-evaluate the risk of having nuclear plants as potential wartime targets."