The Guardian

Pollution

Contaminated water flowing into Black Sea

Julian Borger

The ecological disaster triggered by the collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam has become a global problem as severely contaminated waters flow into the Black Sea, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said yesterday.

The Ukrainian president said the flood waters raging through the lower Dnipro river valley brought with them sewage, oil, chemicals and possibly anthrax from animal burial sites in their path.

“At least two anthrax burial places are in the temporarily-occupied territories,” Zelenskiy said in an online discussion with environmental activists. “What is happening to those sites we do not know yet.”

Kyiv has accused Russian forces of blowing up the dam on Tuesday morning and thereby committing ecocide. As well as the 100,000 people affected downstream, he said 50,000 hectares of forests had been flooded, and 20,000 animals and 10,000 birds were “under threat of imminent death”.

“Altogether 2 million living beings are in danger,” Zelenskiy said, warning that as the contaminated water spread, so would the environmental devastation.

“The poisoning and contamination coming from the flooding area goes to the ground water almost immediately, poisoning rivers and then the water basin of the Black Sea,” he said. “So it’s not happening somewhere else. It is all interrelated in the world.” Zelenskiy was speaking among growing concerns over the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, some 120 miles upstream from the dam. For the purposes of cooling its reactor cores and spent fuel, the plant has drawn on the Kakhova reservoir, but the reservoir is now rapidly draining into the lower Dnipro.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has said there is no immediate risk to the plant because it has water reserves, particularly a large cooling pond.

However, a new report by the French Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety, has said that earlier studies have suggested the dike around the cooling pond could collapse under the pressure of the water in it, if the depth of the reservoir on the other side of the dyke dipped below 10 metres. It is currently below 13 metres and falling.

The relief effort on the Ukrainian-held right bank of the Dnipro continued yesterday, as the official death toll rose to six. One person was killed and two injured as displaced people and relief workers came under artillery fire from the Russian side of the river.

World

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2023-06-09T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-06-09T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://guardian.pressreader.com/article/281951727216638

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