Is it the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine?
WSJ ran an article on it earlier this month:
"Russian Army Turns Ukraine’s Largest Nuclear Plant Into a Military Base
Land mines and missile launchers are deployed at Zaporizhzhia, as cameras and instruments go dark and workers are held for ransom
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station is under control of the Russian National Guard.
July 5, 2022
The Russian army is transforming Europe’s largest nuclear power plant into a military base overlooking an active front, intensifying a months long safety crisis for the vast facility and its thousands of staff.
At the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine, more than 500 Russian soldiers who seized the facility in March recently have deployed heavy artillery batteries, and laid anti-personnel mines along the shores of the reservoir whose water cools its six reactors, according to workers, residents, Ukrainian officials, and diplomats. The Ukrainian army holds the towns dotted on the opposite shore, some 3 miles away, but sees no easy way to attack the plant, given the inherent danger of artillery battles around active nuclear reactors.
The new infusion of weaponry effectively shields the plant from a counterattack by Ukrainian forces, and amounts to something the carefully regulated atomic-energy industry has never seen before: The slow-motion transformation of a nuclear power station into a military garrison. In a lesser-scrutinized aspect of its war strategy, the Russian army is day-by-day positioning the weaponry around a nuclear plant that is among the world’s largest, using it to cement control of the front line where their advance through southern Ukraine ground to a halt.
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“They are keeping it like a base for their artillery,” said a European official posted to the nearby city of Zaporizhzhia, which remains in Ukrainian control. “They understand that Ukraine will not answer their attacks from the plant.”
“It seems like this is one of the Russian tactics, to take critical infrastructure and use it as a shield,” said former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk. “We’re not going to storm the plant….The only way to do it would be to surround it, to take the surrounding areas, and ask them to leave.”
Zaporizhzhia employees and their families fear the plant’s growing militarization could lead to another accident just 300 miles from Chernobyl, scene of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. “They don’t understand what might happen because of their actions there,” said the wife of one worker.
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On Wednesday, the Ukrainian state energy company Energoatom, which still manages the plant, said Russian troops were threatening to drain the cooling pools to find any weapons they suspected Ukrainian resistance fighters had hidden underwater. That could pose a serious challenge to the plant, which relies on a steady flow of filtered water to cool its reactors and spent fuel rods.
As their occupation grinds on, some Russian soldiers stationed at Zaporizhzhia have turned to a strategy of routine extortion: kidnapping some of the 11,000 plant workers for ransom. More than 40 people are currently being held captive, say plant workers, with families using group chats on the social-media messaging app Viber to share pictures of abducted personnel and crowdfund their ransoms. At the plant, their colleagues complain they are having to work extra hours to cover the shifts of kidnapping victims.
“Please help me,” one man posted to a Viber group, sharing photos of his heavily bruised face and right leg, his right eye bloodshot. Russians would only release him, he added, if he raised 50,000 hryvnias, equivalent to $1,681, within three days.
“Such cases are by no means isolated,” said a plant worker who recently fled the area for unoccupied Ukraine. The workers being held for ransom include his friend, an instructor of safety protocol who also provided psychological counseling for the plant’s staff. “No one wants to be next,” the worker said.
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Nuclear safety specialists say that without independent experts visiting the site, it is difficult to assess the various risks that Russian land mines, artillery and loosely disciplined soldiers pose to the plant’s two active reactors. The takeover of an active nuclear power plant is unprecedented and presents a series of complex, interlocking questions, such as whether the mines around the reservoir could damage the filters that sieve the water pumped into the reactors."
What can I say, the R F__kers.