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    • Ukraine’s frontline school system goes underground to protect against bombs and radiation
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    Ukraine’s frontline school system goes underground to protect against bombs and radiation

    Harry Posted on

    Lori Hinnant
    | Associated Press

    Zaporozhye, Ukraine — Being a parent in Ukraine’s front-line city of Zaporizhia means comparing your child’s life to Russian weapons within striking distance.

    Most deaths come at once: UAVs, ballistic missiles, glide bombs, artillery shells. But Russian soldiers control another potentially equally lethal weapon they have never used before: the nearby Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.

    As is known, the nuclear power plant once produced more electricity than any other nuclear power plant in Europe. It fell to Russian forces in the first weeks of the full-scale invasion, and Russia has retained six of its reactors ever since. The facility has been subject to repeated attacks, with both sides blaming each other.

    These twin dangers (bombs and radiation) overshadow families in Zaporizhia. Many of the city’s youngest residents have never seen the inside of a classroom. Schools, which suspended face-to-face classes more than four years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic, resumed online classes after the start of the war in February 2022.

    So, while missiles and bombs still attack daily, Zaporizhzhya goes on a construction spree, creating an underground school system for its future.

    Construction has begun on a dozen underground schools designed to be radiation- and bomb-proof and capable of educating 12,000 students. Officials say they will start the hospital system later.

    Kateryna Ryzhko, mother of Kateryna Ryzhko, whose children are the third generation in her family to attend school No. 88, said daily bombs are a more tangible fear than radiation. The main building, dating from the Soviet era of the children’s grandmother, is spotless, but the classrooms are empty. The underground version is almost complete, and Ryzhko said he would not hesitate to send his children to classes there. Nearly four years of online learning have taken a toll on both children and parents.

    “Even classmates don’t know each other,” he said. “This is the only safe way to get an education without being on a screen.”

    nuclear shadow

    A few days after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Zaporizhia’s 300,000 residents found themselves on the front lines. Unlike larger Ukrainian cities like Kiev or Kharkiv, there is no subway system that could do double duty as a bomb shelter, and few schools had basements where students could attend classes more safely.

    Many residents left, but some returned. But the detached houses and Soviet-style apartment blocks of the region’s eponymous capital, Zaporizhia, filled almost as quickly with Ukrainians fleeing areas captured by Russian forces, such as the cities of Mariupol, Melitopol and Berdyansk.

    Schools were empty at the start of the academic year in September 2022, when the return to classrooms after the pandemic will be celebrated. To protect against the shock waves of the bombs, the windows were boarded up and the lawns were left neglected. The nuclear reactor, fifty kilometers (31 miles) away, went into cold shutdown after intense negotiations between the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Russian government.

    The IAEA has since rotated a handful of staff at the facility. There are risks even in the case of a cold shutdown, where the reactor operates but does not produce power. The real danger is that the external power supply from the Ukrainian-controlled area, which is under constant Russian bombardment, will be cut off for a period longer than the generators can handle.

    The nuclear power plant needs electricity to keep critical backups running, including melt-preventing water pumps, radiation monitors and other essential safety systems.

    During a recent Associated Press tour of the Ukrainian-controlled area closest to the nuclear power plant, two air-dropped bombs hit electrical infrastructure within minutes of nighttime. Russia has repeatedly attacked Ukraine’s power grid, and these attacks have intensified this year. Underscoring the continued danger, the nuclear power plant was once again cut off for three days as emergency officials tried to extinguish the fire. For at least the seventh time this year, the plant was left without a single power line or generator power, according to the Global Nuclear Energy Agency.

    “Nuclear power plants are not intended to be disconnected from the grid. It is not designed for this. It was also not designed to operate in cold shutdown for that long,” said Darya Dolzikova, a nuclear policy researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accuses Russia of deliberately targeting nuclear power plants. The 1986 meltdown at Ukraine’s Chernobyl, located on the northern border about 900 kilometers (550 miles) from Zaporozhye, increased rates of thyroid disease among Ukrainian children far from the country’s accident site, before radiation spread across much of the Northern Hemisphere. polluted the immediate environment. . To this day, the area around the facility, known as Chernobyl in Russian, is considered a “restricted zone”, except for the technical personnel required to keep the decommissioned site safe.

    Russian forces took control of Chernobyl in the early days of the occupation, but were repelled by Ukrainian forces.

    Experts say the Zaporizhia plant has a safer, more modern design than Chornobyl and does not pose the same danger of a large-scale meltdown. But this does not reduce the risk to zero, and Russia will remain a threatening neighbor even after the war is over.

    Sam Lair, a researcher at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said an investment that might seem excessive elsewhere is more understandable in Ukraine.

    “They’re there, they’re under conventional air and missile attack from the Russians, and they have experience that these attacks don’t just target military targets,” Lair said. “If I were them, I’d build them too.”

    In addition, the Zaporizhia region received a donation of 5.5 million iodine pills from the European Union; These pills help block the thyroid’s absorption of some radiation.

    Since the beginning of the war, Russia has repeatedly talked about its nuclear weapons stockpile without eliminating direct threats. In September, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia would consider any attack by a country backed by a nuclear-armed country as a joint attack, and emphasized that Russia could respond with nuclear weapons to any attack that posed a “critical threat to our sovereignty.” .”

    Ukrainian officials fear that Russia’s attacks on the Chernobyl and Zaporozhye nuclear power plants may be just the beginning. In a speech to the UN General Assembly in late September, Zelenskyy warned that Russia was preparing to attack more nuclear power plants that produce the bulk of Ukraine’s electricity.

    “God forbid, if Russia causes a nuclear disaster at one of our nuclear power plants, radiation does not respect state borders,” Zelenskyy said.

    underground for the future

    The cost of building an underground school system is enormous; The budget of the underground version of Gymnasium No. 71 alone is more than 112 million hryvnia ($2.7 million). International donors fund most of this, and national and local governments have made it a priority on par with funding the military.

    “Everyone understands that strengthening the army and aid is priority No. 1,” said Ivan Fedorov, head of the Zaporizhzhia region. “But who will we fight for if we lose our new generation of Ukrainians?”

    Daria Oncheva, a 15-year-old student of Gymnasium 71, is looking forward to underground classes; And not just because he’ll end up in the same place as his schoolmates.

    “It’s safer than sitting at home remotely,” he said.

    Across town, School No. 88 is further away, its rooms hollowed out and encased in concrete thick enough to block the first radiation attack. The contractor carrying out the project is also digging trenches for the Ukrainian army. When finished, it will also be the primary bomb shelter for the neighborhood, where single-family homes have small orchards and trellised gardens but no basements.

    An optimistic timeline would see the school be ready for children by December. It has a three-layer rebar structure consisting of a total of 400 tons of metal and 3,100 cubic meters of reinforced concrete. The top of the building will include about a meter (yard) of soil, which will be hidden by a football field and playground.

    The school will have the ability to operate independently for three days, including an air filtration system, two separate power lines and extra food and water supplies.

    Michael Dillon, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who studies how people can survive nuclear fallout, said being underground increases survival by a factor of 10.

    But Alicia Sanders-Zakre of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons said ultimately people can do more — “which is to eliminate these weapons rather than even build a Band-Aid for the real problem.”

    Lyudmila Zlatova, who has been the principal of School No. 88 for 30 years, hopes that this building will be a structure designed for the dangers that Zaporizhia will face in the future. But he and the recently reunited parents were most interested in the present; They were talking at the edge of the construction pit as air raid sirens blared.

    It takes 10 seconds for a bomb to reach a neighborhood from the front line, leaving little time for evacuation and landing with frustrating frequency. The sunless rooms and concrete corridors of the underground school would only make the children more comfortable, given the situation they were already enduring, he said.

    “They will feel better studying without windows,” said Zlatova, looking at the construction site.

    Zlatova believes that this will bring back at least some of the families who left Zaporozhia for other cities in Ukraine or elsewhere in Europe. The city remains fully functional, with public transportation operating, grocery stores, markets and restaurants operating, and limited repairs of structures damaged by bombardment continuing. About 150 of the school’s 650 pre-war students left the city, but he said he was in contact with families who were not there and many had promised to return home once a safe place to study was available.

    There’s already one in gym 6, which spans freshmen through high school. Its main building is located at the easternmost edge of the city, closer to the front than other schools, 40 kilometers (25 mi) away.

    No wonder the school’s principal, Kostyantyn Lypskyi, looked a little worn out at the beginning of the academic year. But at least their students can attend because parents spent money last year to turn the basement shelter, about 50 yards from the main school building, into a series of classrooms.

    The underground school, whose concrete walls and relatively thin metal doors are not radiation-proof but protect against explosions, holds about 500 people; This is the same number as the new designs. The school has twice that number, so students will spend rotating weeks. The youngest children receive full-time education just above the shelter, while the older ones are in the main building.

    “Of course it will work,” he said. “We have prepared everything for the new academic year”

    An air raid alert in the early days of the school year meant he could test that confidence. It took five minutes from the moment the sirens rang until the last children took their seats, spread out their books, and waited for instructions.

    It was morning and they were getting ready for the new day.

    Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza contributed from Santa Cruz, California. Alex Babenko contributed from Zaporizhia, Ukraine.

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