Chernobyl Containment Facility ‘Lifetime is Now Compromised’ by Armed Drone Strike

The damage caused by a drone strike on the massive structure that contains the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in mid-February may be worse than initially feared, with the detection of numerous small fires still burning in between the outer shell’s layers, and the realization that there appears to be no safe way to repair the automobile-sized gap in the airtight shield that protects the outside world from the stricken nuclear facility.

Shortly after 2:00 am on February 14, 2025, an attack drone armed with a high-explosive warhead struck the outer wall of the New Safe Confinement (NSC) building that was installed over the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant’s aging sarcophagus in 2016, tearing a 15-square meter (161 square foot) hole in the structure and igniting numerous fires in the insulation in between the inner and outer walls. While initial firefighting efforts appeared to have been successful, infrared scans of the facility show indications of “smouldering fires in the insulation between the layers of the arch-shaped New Safe Confinement structure” still burning weeks after the initial strike, according to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi, with fire crews “injecting water to put them out”.

“The firefighters and other responders are working very hard in difficult circumstances to manage the impact and consequences of the drone strike,” Grossi added. “It was clearly a serious incident in terms of nuclear safety, even though it could have been much worse. As I have stated repeatedly during this devastating war, attacking a nuclear facility must never happen.”

On-site teams report that radiation levels outside of the NSC remain normal: in addition to the inner wall of the structure reportedly not having been breached, the physical footprint of the 110-meter (361-foot) arched building ensures that a safe distance from the radioactive debris contained within can be maintained by anyone that accidentally ventures too close to the plant.

But while Chernobyl’s radioactive contamination is currently contained by the NSC’s inner wall, repairing the hole in the outer shell may present a substantial challenge to repair crews: according to an anonymous NSC science advisor in contact with science YouTuber Kyle Hill, the area where the drone impacted, being closer to the plant’s reactor than areas closer to the building’s base, is exposed to radiation levels five times higher than normal, similar to levels near the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.

While exposure to these radiation levels, around 100 microsieverts, are safe for short periods of time, engineering crews attempting to repair the NSC would be required to spend more than the handful of minutes in the area that would be considered acceptable to make the repair effort practical. Hill says that his source reports that “there is currently no consensus regarding how to proceed” with the repairs, although some NSC advisors “are advocating patching up the NSC and accelerating the work on the sarcophagus,” or perhaps rolling the structure back to its nearby construction site to affect repairs. Regardless of what decision is made, Hill’s source says that “the NSC lifetime is now compromised.”

While Ukraine asserts that Russia is responsible for the drone strike, the Kremlin denies that they perpetrated the attack, although nuclear material was stolen from the facility while Russian forces occupied the region in 2022. The IAEA has refused to speculate on who is to blame, with Director Grossi stating during a United Nations conference last year that “we are not commentators. We are not political speculators or analysts, we are an international agency of inspectors.

“And in order to say something like that, we must have proof, indisputable evidence, that an attack, or remnants of ammunition or any other weapon, is coming from a certain place. And in this case it is simply impossible”.