Experts have expressed concerns about a possible nuclear disaster in Ukraine after Russia attacked Zaporizhzhia, Chernobyl and Kharkiv’s Institute of Physics & Technology.
Troops honed in on Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest power plant, last week and a fire that broke out due to shelling.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba warned at the time that it could have been '10 times larger than Chernobyl' if the facility exploded.
Rockets were also reportedly being fired at Kharkiv's Physics & Technology and that facility contains 37 nuclear fuel cells in its core.
Ukrainian foreign minister Emine Dzheppar confirmed: “The Russian aggressor fired hail at the Institute's territory, where the Neutron Source nuclear facility is located, with 37 nuclear fuel cells loaded into its core.
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"Destruction of a nuclear installation and storage facilities for nuclear materials can lead to a large-scale environmental catastrophe."
Experts have stated that this could cause damage to the reactor or the electrical supply, which affects the systems that keep the nuclear core of a reactor cool.
Former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission Allison Macfarlane, warned there are 'a number of ways this can go very bad'.
Macfarlane also revealed that if you hit the reactor vessel: “You’d lose water, and you’d have a loss of coolant event and melt the fuel. I assume you would breach the containment as well, and then you’d definitely have a massive release of radiation.”
While reactors are obviously a huge target, Robert Rosner, a physicist at the University of Chicago, warned that 'a spent fuel pool containing many used fuel assemblies' would also be a hotspot because they're usually less protected.
“A missile hitting the spent fuel pool would be really pretty bad news,” Rosner said, according to The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Nuclear experts have also said that an assault on these nuclear power plants could also repeat the ‘Fukushima’ atomic disaster in 2011 - where a tsunami cut electricity to the power plant, damaging the cooling system.
Nuclear power expert M.V. Ramana of the University of British Columbia said: “If these are occupied through military action, one can easily imagine these being damaged as well, in which case there may be an absence of cooling completely.
"And that could lead to a meltdown, sort of what we saw in Fukushima.”
Ramana also said these attacks were unprecedented, and we are moving into ‘uncharted territory’.
“We have never had so many reactors in a battle zone. The act of attacking a reactor should not be within the purview of any military plan.”
Charisa Bossinakis