The Ukrainian government warned Friday that radiation levels near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant site have “exceeded” control levels, as the Russian military confirmed it has captured the area but insisted that radiation levels remained “normal.”
“The control levels of gamma radiation dose rate in the Exclusion zone were exceeded,” the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine, a government body, said in a statement early Friday.
Local experts “connect this with disturbance of the top layer of soil from the movement of a large number of radio heavy military machinery through the Exclusion zone and increase of air pollution,” it added. However, it noted that “the condition of Chernobyl nuclear facilities and other facilities is unchanged.”
Earlier Friday, the body said that although data “from the automated radiation monitoring system of the exclusion zone” indicated that the control levels of gamma radiation had risen, it was “currently impossible to establish the reasons for the change in the radiation background in the exclusion zone because of the occupation and military fight in this territory.”
The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a 1,000-square-mile zone of forest surrounding the shuttered plant and lies between the Belarus-Ukraine border and the Ukrainian capital.
The Chernobyl nuclear power plant, then under the control of the Soviet Union, became infamous as the scene of an April 1986 disaster, when a series of explosions and fires sent a huge radioactive cloud over parts of Europe and left a no man’s land of contaminated soil and other fallout, which remains dangerous.
The catastrophe ranks as the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident.
