Of course it is not official, just a story from old university classmates who visited station recently to do some maintenance in their speciality area.
Zaporozhye NPP was built buy Russians during Soviet times. It uses very popular Russian reactors WWER that is used on many nuclear power plants around the world. After 2014 Ukrainian operator stop buying rods and maintenance from Rosatom and invited Westinghouse to experiment with replacing Russian made rods with Westinghouse counterfeit ones. For over 8 years Westinghouse tried to replicate original rods without any success. Useless Westinghouse rods was just stockpiled by Westinghouse retards in a barns around station. It is a very bad and dangerous idea to put rods made from some random shit into working nuclear reactor in attempt to sort out those that will somehow work. After taking back Zaporozhye NPP Rosatom had to find all counterfeit Westinghouse rods in reactors and replace them with normal ones. One of reactors was fully loaded with different experimental Westinghouse rods, but hopefully was never runned at some decent power level. Also, normal rods are heavily depleted, since Ukraine did not replace them in the hope that Westinghouse will made new rods for them anytime soon. So, reactors have to be silenced. There also was found a lot of unauthorized by IAEA changes made during experimentations. That is why West tried to fuck with IAEA inspection, even tried to kidnap them and shelling plant in a desperate attempt to hide the fact of criminal experiments on running power plant in populated area.
The market for nuclear fuel is huge, and big part of it is rods for Soviet reactors sold by Rosatom. Usually contracts are many decades long but Westinghouse dreamed to hijack that part of market if they will be able to counterfeit russian rods and impose some king of sanctions over Russian ones. That is why the West so outraged about loosing control over their test facility kindly provided by Ukrainian puppets. It is a trillion market and now they lost it. I suppose no other European country will allow such insane experiments on their power stations build around Russian reactors.
So, it is even not about some electricity shutdowns or anything else. It is about coverup of huge fuckup of Westinghouse.
It is also, fortunately, not about producing some nuclear weapon grade matirials, as some rumors insist.
Hardly IAEA inspection will say something about Westinghouse experiments officially, but Westinghouse will know that they know and so on.
PS: Meanwhile that Ukrainian "Energoatom" company have absolutly no clue about current situation on power plant and never had since beginning of the war. It is not Energoatom station anymore in any possible way. So anything they tell about it is complete fake. They are very afraid of possible problems from IAEA due to illegal Westinghouse experiments so lying non-stop to lay the blame to somebody else.
PPS: Don't take that as absolute truth, I can't check it by myself, but at least that story have no contradictions with other known facts and looks much more logical than any other I heard around.
I think it's an entirely plausible case, but I think something quite different is actually going on.
First, I would argue that the level of Ukrainian lying is so unlimited and over the top, they wouldn't worry a bit about lying here. So if all this potentially dangerous activity was to come to light, they'd just say, "That's bullshit! It was perfectly fine when we left and so the orcs must have done it either through stupidity or malice or both. How dumb and evil they are!"
Were Russia and the IAEA to present the case as you've described, none of it would make it to Western media. And even if it did, roughly 0% of mainstream normies could make it past the first paragraph, IOW, Ukraine doesn't have much to worry about.
Second, the Ukrainian desire to retake control of the ZNPP cannot be understated. Last I heard, at least 3000 have been killed in the attempt which means probably 10K other casualties, along with numerous pieces of equipment including aircraft. It was more costly than the whole "Kherson offensive", and they kept trying even after stunning losses.
So what's so important about the ZNPP? IDK, but my guess is that they hid the materials for nuclear weapons there, or perhaps finished products. This all recalls similar outsized importance at Chernobyl early in the conflict. The elevated background radiation from the plant would mask all signatures. I believe they want those weapons back for two big reasons.
One reason is that public exposure of their possession of nukes blows their legitimacy out of the water, even among the dumbed-down masses. Not that they're beyond doing it, but any Westerner that backs a nuclear rogue really puts their own legitimacy on the line. And the rest of the multi-polar world will certainly know what's up no matter what excuses or justifications are made.
The other big reason, as I've argued before, is that they would love to arrange a nuclear false flag, but the hang up is they got no nukes at all, not even one. Russia has been systematically grinding the Ukie army under it's boot heel and will continue to do so absent a big change in the dynamic. The only change available is to spark a full-on NATO war, and a nuke false flag in a European capital (Tallinn?) might do that.
Well, here's hoping I'm all wrong.
Looks like they use the same concept of "creating reality with narrative" that was used during coronahoax. Russian MSM lies too, but it is old-style mix of truth, lie and failure to mention.
That is not how that things works. As far as I understand, the goal was not some MSM campaign, but papers. It's like all that ICAO things about planes. Somwhere deep in the belly of that IAEA agency will be a paper track of all that stuff. May be it will be never published, but it will create a lot of problems for the participants of that unauthorized tests for further authorization and all that bureaucratic stuff.
It is overestimation. AFAIK in the latest attempts Ukrainian military lost ~300 people near ZNPP.
ZNPP is under Russian control since the very beginning. If there was something about nuclear weapons, Russian propaganda definitely would have been used it already. There initially was rumors about some enriched weapon-grade uranium, but it was never confirmed officially. So, either there are no nuclear weapon stuff, or Russian state is in one game with West. Latter have no confirmations, info or leaks from locals.
Really, things are not so easy, but yes, there is some kind of slow grinding of Ukrainian military and weapons with insane casualities ratio. Either West have stupidiest strategists, or it is done intentionally to kill as much Ukrainians as possible.
IDK, if that war is to force Great Reset in Europe, then why they need that insane grinding? Slow war with little casualities would have been enough to create necessary fearmongering and reasons in MSM.
Why are they grinding down the Ukrainian military? Because the Western Neo-Imperialists will have it no other way. Russia plainly stated at the beginning that one of their main goals was the demilitarization of Ukraine. Obviously they had hoped for a negotiated settlement concerning the UAF, but all they got is deployed military units. They plan to achieve their objectives and if this is the only path presented, they'll take it.
Ukraine is a complete puppet of the West and will never recover. Here's an article from six months ago and is not propaganda, coming from that maniac Arestovich himself: Ukraine says its defense industry has been almost destroyed. But they won't quit because their masters have not given them permission to quit.
Nor are their master's other puppets doing well, as they are also in the process of demilitarization: Logistic Peril for NATO Weapons to Ukraine: Dwindling stocks of leading-edge systems probably will mean more casualties.
Make no mistake, the war is to destroy Russia, and that's been the plan for over a century. It finally boiled over in a way that Russia could not avoid despite all efforts to do so, including a plea to return to the Minsk accords less than a week before the SMO. I have reason to believe that they've been planning for this unavoidable time since the 90's, and have had to sit on their hands many times because they weren't strong enough to finish what got started. They would not have started the SMO in Ukraine unless they were certain they could finish.
You can make no conclusion about Russia making no formal announcements about Ukrainian nukes, none. They play their cards extremely close to the vest, closer than I ever thought. Who predicted the SMO? No one. Not one single person takes credit for doing that because the entire world was fooled.
The Ukrainians got totally head faked. No one remembers that Big Z said, "There will be no war" right before it started. The US got double head-faked. After weeks of war-mongering and predicting invasion within hours, nothing happened. When they finally gave it up, Russia struck. Note that they didn't even take false credit for being "right"! They all knew how wrong they were, and they were totally unprepared for an actual military conflict. It was supposed to start with the Nazis invading Donbass with Russia on the back foot. They had no idea what was coming. No one did.
Hardly. The scale have to be magnitude orders larger.
US government. Because they perfectly know that if they order to attack DPR/LPR, than Russia will have to invade.
At least that is how it looks like. There is a huge possibility that it is all staged, because Putin is 100% NWO puppet, and participation in coronahoax proves it undoubtedly.
As for nuclear weapons, I also recalled that at the beginning Russian troops also got Chernobyl territory, but later leave. Like they search something there and found nothing.
Really, Ukraine have no ability to produce nuclear weapons. They destroyed all soviet facilites and labs that could possibly do it. Even with import of western specialists they just have no place where they can do it. The best thing they could do is a dirty bomb.
There is also another theory about ZNPP mess around - West need any nuclear accident in that area to cover up wishful use of shells with depleted uranium against Russia/DPR/LPR.
Also, just for information. Ukrainian military have no weapons that could somehow harm power plant itself. Soviet nuclear power plants protection calculated to fully protect against kamikadze attack of heavy plane with ammunition. The only vulnerable thing is barns with used and failed rods. But even if a largest shell blow up in storage, than only few square kilometers will be contaminated, because there will be no any noticeable amount of lightweight radioactive dust or vapours. Rod is a tough metal thing, of course, you could blow it, but all you will get is rather large radioactive pieces, that will not fly far.
All known serious nuclear disasters on NPP occured when reactor run out of limits, not because of external impact.
You think the Russians searched Chernobyl and found nothing, so they left? How could you possibly know that? Why wouldn't you think they found exactly what they were looking for, then left?
Really, your analysis there focuses on exactly the wrong aspect of it. The question isn't why they left, it's why they went there in the first place. Do you really think they had nothing better to do than to expend military resources during the first incursion seizing a rusty, mildly radioactive tourist attraction? What possible point have you imagined in your analysis there was to that?
But nevermind about answering any of those questions. I thank you for the insight you've already shared.