russian military forced the others to shut down and it lost its main connection to the nation s power grid and atomic safety experts are extremely worried. cnn s melissa bell has the latest from ukraine. reporter: there s been good news from the ukrainian counteroffensive tonight according to officials here in kyiv with an aide to president zelenskyy of what he says is the ukrainian flag. this town has been the center of battles for some time and we are getting some confirmation of the fact it may be now in ukrainian hands and also on the russian side, with some talk of the retreat of russian forces around the town. it is of course a counteroffensive now going on for just about a week and about which ukrainian authorities have been remaining pretty tight lipped insisting this is about degrading russian military capabilities, trying to take out infrastructure that allows them to resupply their troops around kherson. not really aimed at fast territorial gains. of course this
facility for example. when it exploded there was nothing at all to contain the radioactive plume and it went out of control very quickly. these are much more modern reactors here, six reactors with very thick containment domes, about a meter or two meters thick, reinforced concrete. you re not going to see a chernobyl type accident. but that s why i make the fukushima comparison. that s what most experts are looking at. so, still, a major nuclear catastrophe, just not quite on the scale of chernobyl. i have to say i agree with bob. i think this is a form of nuclear terrorism. putin is using this to try to get ukraine to surrender and to try to get the west to back off. so far, both are holding firm. i d look for one more move. i suspect that in the back of putin s mind is also a plan to steal this plant. it s connected to the ukrainian power grid. putin might say that for safety reasons we now have to connect it to the russian power grid in effect stealing ukrainian energy
literally under gunpoint right now, i m worried you lose the pumps, that means you lose the water, that means the fuel can overheat and become damaged leading to a nuclear meltdown. everyone s mind, of course, went quickly to chernobyl when hearing about this. what is different though here with this facility? there are two key differences here. one of the most critical pieces is the containment dome that this plant has. so chernobyl style reactors didn t have any containment around their reactor pressure vessels but the reactor at the site have modern style robust containment domes. so this is 5 feet thick of reinforced steel and concrete capable of actually withstanding a direct strike from the airplane. and the other piece of it, there s one other piece of it as well actually. so the reactors chernobyl in a
and now, to michael, the foam director of homeland security for the state of new york, and right now managing partner of blue water international a global security firm. this was a time not that long ago where everybody was afraid of nuclear power and japan came long and in the united states we have needs. where are we? guest: as you know, 30 years we have not had any new licenses and obviously it was a defining moment, that, yes, the unthinkable can happen, and the plant in why.right now is a new design and a passive system so what went wrong in japan they are saying cannot go wrong here because you did not rely on a generator kicking in but the natural forces will shut it down. it is all about the core meltdown. that is why you have containment domes. you look at the history of nuclear power it has been relatively safe compared to other types of energy.
were forced to withdraw after radiation levels surged early in the day. it doesn t say where. it says work on dousing reactors with water. they are obviously not cooling those reactors down. shepard: from the very beginning, what we ve been told on camera and off camera is this, we are fine as long as we can keep liquid on to that place. as long as we can still have our workers there, everything is fine. what happens if we can have our workers there is a different story. what we ve been told from the beginning is, we won t get to that point. we are sure we are fine. we are sure this is contained. we are sure the containment domes are in place. we are positive this is not any sort of chernobyl. we will be able to keep our work . as a result the situation which is already bad will not get worse. now the workers are gone. now i don t know what the future holds, but it does not look pretty. greta: for the benefit of