The Fukushima facility was 40 years old. For a conventional power plant, that does not sound like much, but nuclear plants are pounded by so much constant, heavy radiation that 40 years is beyond designed lifespan. I suspect that Zaporizhzha is close to or beyond that age as well. (We had a fancy new reactor built down the river when I was a teenager, and I later learned that is was expected to run for 27 years.)
Are you sure? That does not sound to me like it would be in the scope of what the Geneva Conventions cover.
Fukashima’s problems had little or less to do with the age of the reactor but a lot to do with a lack of oversight, complacency, poor preparedness, and poor decision making in responding to the disaster. That said, built today things probably would be different even if the disaster never happened.
Nuclear plants, at least in the west, were typically designed with a 30-40 year lifespan, but there’s no technical barrier in extending the service life. It’s more a question of cost and politics. Many of the reactors in the US have already been approved for 20-year extensions and there are plans to create further extension programs and there is an expectation some could run up to 80-100 years. That’s not to say upgrades are not installed over time. The cost of building nuclear plants is so expensive that it makes sense to use them for as long as safely and practically possible.
Zaporizhzha was built in 1979 and opened in 1984 if I remember correctly- which probably means a lot of the core technology dates back to the early 70’s if not earlier.
The Geneva Convention says regarding targeting “dangerous forces” (which specifically mentions nuclear plants (and dams for that matter)
“…shall not be made the object of attack, even when these objects are military objectives,
if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population."
Presumably, any sort of explosive weapons targeting a nuclear plant could constitute risking harm to civilians. But if a ballistic missile targeting lets say an air defense system accross the street from the power plant, misses its mark, blows up the plant instead, and creates a radiological catastrophe arguably it would not be a war crime because it was an accident, despite the obvious risk involved with the attack.
There’s other issues described here:
https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-are-attacks-on-nuclear-plants-legal-under-international-law/a-62859174
On the same topic, if Russia is indeed responsible for blowing the dam, I think it’s fair to say that is another war crime.
Just to highlight the challenge of destroying dams, in WWII the Soviets destroyed the Dneiper Dam in Zaporizhzhya. They used
20 tons of TNT to blow out only a portion of the structure.
