At the Zaporizhzhia NPP, preparations are underway to restore two external power supply lines, but first, safe conditions for repair crews must be ensured. The head of Rosatom, Alexey Likhachev, reported on the problem on October 11: the equipment at the Zaporizhzhia Thermal Power Plant, through which electricity flows from the Ferrosplavnaya line to the NPP, is in a critical state. A separate task is the restoration of the Dneprovskaya line, which has not been operational since March.
The scale of the problem is evident from the history of outages. According to the IAEA, by August 2026, the plant had experienced 26 complete losses of external power supply since the beginning of the conflict. Before the hostilities, it had ten external lines, and now the reliability of power supply depends on a much more limited number of connections. Moreover, even after repairing the line itself, it may be necessary to restore the associated substation equipment.
External electricity is necessary for the plant even with reactors shut down: it powers pumps and other systems on which the cooling of nuclear fuel depends. If external power is lost, emergency diesel generators must provide it. This is why repeated outages create additional stress on the nuclear safety system, although they do not in themselves mean an imminent accident.
The problem has been repeatedly resolved with the help of local ceasefire regimes mediated by the IAEA. However, restoring power supply does not eliminate the root cause of vulnerability: damage to the grid infrastructure and the risk of new outages persist. Without stable access for repair crews to the equipment, restored lines may again be at risk.