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On Monday, hundreds of firefighters continued to fight a forest fire in the Ukrainian Chernobyl exclusion zone, as authorities insist that there is no risk in the vicinity of the emergency reactor and nuclear waste storage facilities.
“There is no threat to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and storage facilities,” said Vladimir Demchuk from the Ukrainian emergency service in a video message on Monday evening.
A fire broke out 10 days ago at the site of the world’s largest nuclear accident in 1986.
Kiev mobilized helicopters and more than 400 firefighters, in addition to planes that dropped tons of water to fight the fire. Demchuk noted that firefighters are now focused on stopping the spread of fire.
Although forest fires are common in the exclusion zone, Greenpeace said Monday that the current fire is the most severe since the 1986 nuclear explosion.
An environmental team indicated that satellite imagery analysis showed that the fire was only 1.5 kilometers from the protective dome that was installed over the damaged reactor.
Sergei Zibtsev, head of the East European Regional Fire Monitoring Center, told AFP that the fire was “very large” and “unpredictable.”
“According to our estimates, in the west of the exclusion zone, it has already covered 20,000 hectares,” he added.
More about Chernobyl
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Chernobyl fire reaches 1.5 kilometers from the reactor
The Ukrainian emergency service did not provide the latest data on the size of the fire.
Yaroslav Emelianenko, head of the Chernobyl Association of Tourist Guides, said the fire reached the ghost town of Pripyat, a city near Chernobyl, whose population of about 50,000 was evacuated after the explosion.
“The situation is critical,” Emelianenko wrote on her Facebook page.
However, the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Anton Gerashchenko said that there is no danger to nuclear waste storage facilities.
“It’s absolutely safe,” he said on Facebook.
A fire broke out on April 4 in a forest near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Police said the fire was started by a man burning dry grass near the exclusion zone around the injured reactor.
Chernobyl contaminated a large strip of Europe when its fourth reactor exploded in April 1986. As a result, people cannot live within 30 kilometers of a power plant.
Three other reactors in Chernobyl continued to generate electricity until the plant finally shut down in 2000. In 2016, a giant protective dome was installed over the fourth reactor.
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