IAEA confirms drone strike damaged cooling tower at Russia’s Kursk nuclear plant

A drone struck the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant unit in western Russia on July 5, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has now formally acknowledged the damage. IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi addressed the incident on July 9, reinforcing concerns that nuclear facilities in conflict zones face an increasingly dangerous threat landscape. The strike hit the cooling tower of unit 2 at Kursk NPP-2, a next-generation nuclear plant still under construction in the Kurchatov area of Russia’s Kursk region. Russian authorities reported no injuries, no radiological consequences, and no operational impacts from the hit, largely because the targeted unit isn’t operational yet. What happened at Kursk-II According to information relayed by Russian officials to the IAEA, the drone impact damaged the cooling tower structure but did not compromise any active nuclear systems. That’s because Kursk NPP-2 is a replacement facility for the aging Kursk nuclear power plant, which runs Soviet-era RBMK reactors, the same design involved in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The new plant is designed to house four VVER-TOI reactors, a modern pressurized water reactor design that represen...