Exhausted Chernobyl staff to be relieved for first time since Russia seized plant

By AP 20 March 2022, 10:53 pm

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The giant protective dome built over the sarcophagus covering the destroyed fourth reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, April 13, 2021. (Sergei Supinsky/ AFP/ File)

LVIV, Ukraine — Management of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, site of the world’s worst nuclear accident in 1986, says today that 50 staff members who had been on the job since the plant was seized by Russian forces on February 24 have been rotated out and replaced.

Officials had repeatedly expressed alarm that the staff was suffering exhaustion after weeks of forced, unrelieved work and that this endangered the decommissioned plant’s safety.

The authority that manages the plant is not providing specifics on how agreement was reached to let the workers leave and others come in to replace them.