Last night’s Chernobyl incident, when a drone hit the concrete shell that protects the remains of damaged nuclear Reactor 4, does not pose any danger to Romania, the National Environmental Protection Agency (ANPM) announced on Friday, adding that the National Environmental Radioactivity Monitoring Network (RNSRM) coordinated by ANPM permanently keeps under watch the nationwide evolution of environmental radioactivity and the levels recorded after this event are within the usual, period-specific limits.
„The RNSRM has a set of permanent verification and warning or alert measures in place, which reveal any increase in radioactivity in the monitored environmental samples, and the current values show that there is no danger to the population following this incident. Data readings at the automatic stations are available online on the ANPM website, respectively on the website of the European Commission’s Radiological Data Exchange Platform. We continue to carefully monitor the evolution of the environmental radioactivity situation, corroborated with the direction of air currents,” declared ANPM vice president Eugen Ioan Cozma.
The entire data set regarding the recorded values is collected through: the national real-time warning/alert system for determining the absorbed gamma dose rate in the air (hourly analyses performed by automatic monitoring stations), with data permanently posted on the ANPM website; lab analyses on various environmental factors such as atmospheric aerosols, atmospheric deposits and surface water – global beta analyses (performed daily) and gamma spectrometric analyses (performed weekly and monthly).
According to information released by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), on February 14, 2025, at 1:54 am, a drone hit the new sarcophagus protecting the remains of Reactor 4 of the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant northern Ukraine, but according to the UN’s nuclear watchdog, up to this point, radiation levels inside and outside Chernobyl remain normal and stable.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday that during the night, a Russian drone carrying a high-explosive warhead damaged the radiation containment dome of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, and that although the damage is significant, the radiation level has not increased so far, EFE reports.
In response, Moscow rejected Ukraine’s accusations, describing them as „a provocation”, Reuters reports.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he had no exact information about the alleged incident, but that Russia was not attacking nuclear infrastructure. „The Russian military does not do this. For this reason, any claim that this is the case is not true,” Peskov insisted in his daily press briefing, as cited by EFE.
Reuters mentions that Chernobyl was the site of the world’s worst civilian nuclear disaster, when one of its four reactors exploded in 1986. The reactor is now covered with a protective shield to prevent persistent radiation leaks. The 108-meter-high, 36,000-ton structure was built in 2016, was fully completed in 2018 and installed in 2019.
AGERPRES
