IAEA team stays on at besieged atomic plant to probe damage

Bloomberg

International monitors remaining at a Russian-occupied atomic plant in Ukraine are staying in order to independently evaluate how continued military attacks against the facility risk a nuclear accident.
International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors arrived at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant after a harrowing journey across the frontline separating Ukrainian and Russian forces.
The sounds of heavy machine-gun fire, artillery and mortars accompanied them during the crossing, agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said late Thursday.
The agency left two teams behind at the Zaporizhzhia plant. One will stay through Sunday and conduct a detailed safety and security analysis that will go into an IAEA report being drafted. A second team will remain as a “resident expert presence” that can provide a neutral assessment of future events, Grossi said.
“It is obvious that the plant and the physical integrity of the plant has been violated several times,” the Argentine diplomat said en route back to Vienna. A long-term presence is needed because inspectors currently “don’t have the elements to assess” whether one side or the other was deliberately targeting the plant, he said.