A nuclear accident at a modern nuclear facility in Ukraine would have an impact area of up to 200 km from the accident site.
The amount of radioactive pollution in the air drops quickly, and although the air flow can move from the accident site to Estonia, the amount of pollution so far from the scene is reduced to very small doses that do not have measurable effect on people. Ukraine's nuclear facilities are located more than a thousand kilometers from Estonia.
There are four operating nuclear power plants in Ukraine: Khmelnytskyi, Rivne, Zaporizhzhia and South Ukraine. Even if one of the 15 reactors were to be damaged, it would not lead to a radiation hazard in Estonia. There is only one nuclear power plant directly in the war zone: the Zaporizhzhia pwer plant. However, the damaged reactor would have a large local impact in Ukraine and, depending on the wind direction, also in Russia.
In case of such an accident, the radioactive contamination does not spread further than 200 kilometers to a significant extent from the point of view of radiation safety.
Estonian radiation hazard early warning monitoring network consists of 15 automatic radiation monitoring stations that continuously measure the level of gamma radiation in the air across Estonia. Automatic stations are important for the detection of possible cross-border radiological effects in case of radiation events in nearby countries. In order to detect very small changes in the outdoor air, the Environmental Board also monitors the radioactivity of airborne particles in Harku, Narva-Jõesuu and Tõvere.
If the radiation level in Estonia or a nearby country should change, the Environmental Board will notify the general public.
The reactors in Ukraine's modern nuclear power plants are different from the Chernobyl reactor. It was the burning on graphite that caused the radioactive pollution from Chornobyl to travel very far. Graphite is no longer in use in modern power plants.
Additional information can be found on the page "Kiirgusolukord Ukrainas".
The data from radiation monitoring can be found on the European Commissions Radiological Maps site.
This text is translated by machine translation.
