by SIMPLICIUS THE THINKER
The most exigent matter on the table is once again the brewing Zaporozhye plant showdown. It’s now believed by some that Zelensky is planning to carry out the ZNPP falseflag in the next few days on the eve of the big NATO summit in Vilnius, which is on July 12. The purpose would be to galvanize the NATO members and shape the entire policy discussion of the summit around Ukraine and the “nuclear disaster”.
For such a plan to work, the ZNPP would have to be blown well in advance to give it at least a few days lead time to shape the proper narrative of ‘fall out’ and nuclear consequences which can be used as the catalyst to bring reluctant NATO members to heel and cement their solidarity with Ukraine, as well as ideally issue some major demarche like the fabled activation of ‘Article 5’ Ukraine so breathlessly dreams about.
There’ve been a variety of developments in this direction. Firstly, a special American nuclear-sniffing plane has arrived in Europe “just in time”:
❗️❗️The WC-135R Constant Phoenix special nuclear monitoring board has arrived in Europe to take atmospheric air samples and control radioactive emissions ❗️❗️
Everything is going to the fact that the Ukronazists will still strike at the NPP in the event of a final failure of the counteroffensive. Of course, under full control and with the approval of the United States and NATO. 😡
“Nuclear sniffer” has arrived in Europe. A special aircraft WC-135R Constant Phoenix of the US Air Force was deployed on June 30 to the Chania airbase in Crete. It is from this base that RQ-4B Global Hawk reconnaissance UAVs and RC-135W Rivet Joint aircraft fly to the Black Sea region.
WC-135R is designed to collect information about radioactive radiation and control nuclear tests. The rarest visit of a special board may be connected with the preparation of a nuclear catastrophe by Kiev at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant.
[metaslider id=173685]
Telegram channel “Resident”:
“Our sources report that a provocation at the ZNPP is planned from July 5 to 9, so that this event becomes a trigger in the West and radically changes the agenda of the NATO summit. British intelligence suggests that the General Staff use the situation for Operation D-Day, to conduct a landing operation on the left bank of the Dnieper.
This follows another spate of Western MSM articles beating the doomsday drums:
[metaslider id=173720]
Including this NYPost article detailing where they believe the fallout will go:
[metaslider id=173693]
Ukrainian propaganda even claims civilians are buying up all the stores and evacuating in light of the threat:
Ukrainian TV plays the emergency signals denoting a nuclear accident to scaremonger their audience:
In a video (which can be seen here, but is not subtitled), a Russian advisor to the nuclear energy agency which operates ZNPP made the following alarming claim for an impending attack:
This is what I warned about a year ago.
Advisor to the head of Rosenergoatom Renat Karchaa: Today we received information that I am authorized to voice. On July 5, at night, at night, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will try to attack the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant using long-range precision weapons, as well as kamikaze unmanned aerial vehicles. At the same time, they plan to drop ammunition from an aircraft, which is equipped with radioactive waste, taken out on July 3 from the South Ukrainian nuclear power plant to one of the military airfields of Ukraine. The backup plan for the release of radioactive substances provides for the use of a high-precision projectile “Tochka-U” with a warhead filled with radioactive waste. That’s the way things are.
Understand very carefully what he’s suggesting, at least as I see it. Recall that I had previously noted it is exceedingly difficult to actuate a real nuclear disaster on the ZNPP in the same way as the Chernobyl incident. Chernobyl was an extremely rare case where the entire containment vessel “blew” from over-pressurization due to a stress test they were conducting on it. There is no real way to access the ZNPP containment vessel. Even a cruise missile strike would not breach that vessel because it’s contained inside the heavy concrete containment building and you would have to do several large strikes that penetrate the same spot just to breach it.
You could however hit the nuclear waste storage casks which sit out in the open, though it’s questionable how radioactive they are given that they are spent waste (well, certainly radioactive but not as much as the live fuel).
They’re located at two spots in the open, here:
[metaslider id=173700]
💥The NPP and the place of storage of spent nuclear fuel💥
The used fuel is stored in the spent nuclear fuel dry storage system.
The complex of the Zaporozhye NPP is designed for 380 ventilated storage containers. On satellite images, you can count 173 containers full of radioactive junk, which the Nazis can strike at 😡
But absent striking those, it would be very difficult to hit and breach a containment vessel. Let’s do a brief overview of why that may be.
Here’s a Ukrainian-sourced article detailing the possibilities. Though it’s full of their slant and propaganda, it has a few useful pieces of information:
Termination of the reactor cooling system at ZAES
And the first thing to understand is that there will be significant differences between the accidents at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the possible disaster at Zaporizhia in any case. This is due to the fact that RBMK reactors were used at the Chernobyl nuclear power Plant, and VVER – 1000 reactors were used at the ZAES, which are considered much safer and much smaller in size. In particular, the reactor itself is located in the middle of a sealed “cylinder” with a height of more than 50 meters, a diameter of 45 meters and a wall thickness of 1.2 meters.
They go on to state that if the reactors were operating normally, meltdown can occur in about two and a half hours. But Russia has put the reactors at ZNPP into cold shutdown as of June 9th, 2023.
At the same time, the time interval is determined by Russian nuclear scientists in the conditions of reactor operation, and at the ZNPP all reactors are stopped from June 9, 2023. It was then that the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate gave an order to transfer the last 5th power unit of the ZNPP to the “cold zupin” state, before that it was in the “hot zupin” mode. As of June 28, it was reported that the occupiers were preventing the transfer of the power unit to Kholodny Zupin.
All other power units of the Kholodny Zupin NPP were withdrawn from August 18, 2022 to February 10, 2023. That is, the time that will pass from the moment of stopping the cooling system at the ZNPP to any consequences can be considered quite large.
But they believe that even with a shut down reactor, the following can occur:
This process no longer strongly depends on whether the power units are in a “cold shutdown” or not. And during the simulation, the scenario of power failure of the cooling system was also considered. After that, after 8 hours, the shells of the fuel elements will be damaged. After 11.5 hours, the water from the pool will completely evaporate, and after 20.5 hours, the concrete floor of the pool will be burned with melt to a depth of 1.2 meters. This process will be accompanied by the release of hydrogen, but it must be absorbed by the plant’s security system, which does not depend on power supply.
But recall the first part: the type of reactor used in ZNPP is considered ‘much safer’ than the Chernobyl reactor, owing to the fact that the pressure vessel itself is much smaller in the center of the large containment building, which has a height of 50 meters to the ceiling, a diameter of 45m and a wall thickness of 1.5m.
So, breaching this building and successfully hitting the small “sealed cylinder” of the reactor would be very difficult without massive amounts of successive strikes hitting the same spot. However, it’s perhaps possible to somehow damage the cooling equipment, pool, pipes, etc., discussed above, and create a meltdown from lack of cooling, though I’m not certain about this as such pipes could be subterranean and built into the pool, which would mean hitting them could be implausible.
But do we know for definite the status of the six reactors at ZNPP? There are headlines like the following which appeared to confirm that on June 10th, Russia shut down the last of the reactors:
Five out of six reactors at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which is occupied by Russian forces, are already in a state of cold shutdown, in which all control rods are inserted into the reactor core to stop the nuclear fission reaction and generation of heat and pressure.
The plant had actually been operating with two of the reactors online up until recently:
As it stands, Zaporizhzhia was placed in a cold shutdown in September 2022. Operators have since restarted two reactors in hot shutdown mode, producing low levels of power to keep the plant operational. Perhaps this is why the IAEA has proposed a “protection zone” for Zaporizhzhia, in which both Ukraine and Russia would agree to refrain from firing at the plant, and heavy weapons would be removed from the area. Grossi correctly recognizes that an agreement of this nature must come from both countries and that their cooperation is essential to move toward any measure of stability.
So now, back to the original question. If you’ve noticed, the threat articulated by Renat Karchaa with specific intelligence he had received was that Ukraine plans to hit the plant with missiles armed with radioactive waste that has previously been taken out of a different nuclear plant. The reason for this is obvious: given that I just explained how difficult it is to actually create a full blown “disaster” in the form of a ‘full meltdown’, this plan would then call for simply spreading detectable radiation over the plant in order to manufacture the narrative that Russia has initiated a plant meltdown/disaster.
Recall that it was my own theory weeks ago which stated that Ukraine would not need to create an actual disaster there because the media would shore up whatever narrative is required by NATO and the West. It seems my forecast was on the right track. The ‘Constant Phoenix’ plane simply needs to get a measurement of radiation drifting from the general vicinity and all the appropriate media campaigns and NATO agendas can be immediately activated with zero oversight.
Noteworthy is that only two countries have previously bombed nuclear plants before, U.S. and Israel:
In 1981, Israel conducted an airstrike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear research reactor, which was linked to a research facility Israel suspected of developing nuclear weapons. Ten years later during the first Gulf War, allied bombers attacked two Iraqi nuclear research reactors, one of which was fully operational and had built up a radioactive inventory. Although there were no significant radiological consequences from either attack, in both cases, the facilities were safeguarded by the IAEA — demonstrating that compliance with the IAEA’s rules offers no protection against hostile actions during combat operations.
Zelensky even made a new address from another southern Nuclear power plant:
The Ukrainian side continues to escalate the situation around the Zaporozhye NPP.
Zelensky said that Russia allegedly has a plan to “remotely detonate” the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant after the Russians transfer control of the nuclear plant to the IAEA and Ukraine.
I note that ZNPP can return under the control of Ukraine only by military means. To do this, the Armed Forces of Ukraine need to break through the front and enter Energodar.
So far, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are not carrying out offensive operations in the direction of Energodar, but there is more and more information about the plans of the Ukrainian army to attack the city through the shallow Kakhovka reservoir.
And as of this writing, he’s released another ominous speech indicating that Russia has now mined the roof of the ZNPP with explosives:
Even RT is covering the threat and Rosenergoatom advisor’s statements:
And for those interested, RT’s even released a documentary on Ukraine’s terror attacks on the ZNPP plant, covering the whole arc from the beginning with a lot of exclusive footage:
Recall that Rafael Grossi equivocated when asked about a potential Russian attack on the plant. While confirming his team did not see anything the plant being “mined” by Russia, he stuck to the company line by leaving the door open to a potential Russian attack.
Though the IAEA also released this statement today:
[metaslider id=173707]
Anyway, the stated window of attack is July 5-9, with some specifically stating July 5th, which logically would happen at night to give the least amount of visibility to Russian cameras/systems in documenting the culprit. So if there’s any truth to the rumors, tonight could potentially be the night.
With that said, we’ve seen that the Air Defender exercises of last month came to a conclusion without the rumors of a falseflag panning out. But it must be remembered that my theory, at least, specified that something would only happen during Air Defender if Ukraine could develop enough of an offensive pressure so as to give plausible credence to a potential Russian ‘falseflag’ of some sort. But Ukraine’s offensive faltered so much that they could not plausibly tie such a falseflag into an adequate narrative.
The same likely goes for the ZNPP scenario right now. The ideal situation would be for Ukraine to actually have made inroads and have Russian forces retreating so that a putative “Russian attack” on the ZNPP plant would have been believable in some dimly logical way. But the fact that they weren’t able to effect any sort of retreat or offensive success means to me the chance of a ZNPP falseflag would theoretically remain low. However, given that the big upcoming NATO summit is one of Ukraine’s last chances to make a splash before Europe potentially goes cold on Ukrainian support, that is the only thing keeping the chances of a desperate falseflag afloat in my view.
But I just wanted to be clear about my stance: which is that, technically, Ukraine did not sow the appropriate ground circumstances to successfully carry out the ZNPP falseflag. For it to have worked correctly they would have made much greater offensive inroads to ostensibly construct the narrative that Putin is “desperate” and his forces “on the retreat”. However, like I said, given their desperation it is possible they will just go for it anyway; I simply think the chance is lower than it would’ve been if they had actually succeeded in prepping the correct groundwork.
For now, we’re in the 11th hour and can only wait and see
Zelenskyy needs a bullet to the head for history to truly repeat itself