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Ukraine’s frontline school system goes underground to protect against bombs and radiation

Ukraine’s frontline school system goes underground to protect against bombs and radiation

ZAPORIZHY, Ukraine (AP) – Being a parent in Zaporozhye, a city on the Ukrainian front, means comparing a child’s life with Russian weapons within striking distance.

Most deaths occur in an instant: drones, ballistic missiles, glide bombs, artillery shells. But Russian soldiers control another weapon they have never used, with potential equally deadly: the nearby nuclear power plant in Zaporozhye.

As is known, the nuclear power plant once produced more electricity than any other nuclear power plant in Europe. It fell into the hands of Russian forces in the first weeks of the full-scale invasion, and Russia has maintained its six reactors ever since. The plant was subject to repeated attacks by both sides blame the other.

These twin dangers – bombs and radiation — shadow families in Zaporozhye. Most of the city’s youngest residents have never seen the inside of a classroom. Schools that suspended face-to-face classes more than four years ago during the Covid-19 pandemic continued online classes after the outbreak of the war in February 2022.

So with rockets and bombs still striking every day, Zaporozhye goes on a rampage to build its future, creating an underground school system.

The construction of several underground schools has begun, which will be resistant to radiation and bombs and capable of educating 12,000 students. Then, officials say, they will begin working on the hospital system.

Daily bombs are a more tangible fear than radiation, says Kateryna Ryzhko, a mother whose children are the third generation in her family to attend School No. 88. The main building, dating from the children’s Soviet-era grandmothers, is pristine, but the classrooms are empty. The underground version is almost completed, and Ryzhko said she wouldn’t hesitate to send her children there for classes. Nearly four years of online learning have taken their toll on both children and parents.

“Even classmates don’t recognize each other,” she said. “It’s the only safe way to get an education and not be on screens.”

Nuclear shadow

Within days of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, 300,000 Zaporozhye residents were on the front lines. Unlike larger Ukrainian cities like Kiev or Kharkiv, there was no subway system that could double as a bomb shelter, and few schools had basements where students could attend classes more safely.

Many residents left, although some returned. But single-family homes and Soviet-style apartment blocks in Zaporozhye, the capital of the region that bears the same name, have filled with Ukrainians fleeing areas captured by Russian forces, such as Mariupol, Melitopol and Berdyansk.

As the school year began in September 2022, marking a post-pandemic return to classrooms, schools were empty. The windows were boarded up to protect against the shock waves of the bombs, and the lawns were left unkempt. Fifty kilometers (31 miles) away is the nuclear reactor went into cold shutdown state after intense negotiations between the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Russian government.

The IAEA changed a a handful of staff on site since then. The risk exists even in the event of a cold shutdown, when the reactor is running but not producing power. The main danger is that external electrical power, coming from territory controlled by Ukrainians and under constant Russian bombardment, will be cut off for periods longer than the generators can withstand.

A nuclear power plant needs electricity to operate key reserves, including water pumps to prevent meltdowns, radiation monitors and other essential safety systems.

During a recent Associated Press trip to the Ukrainian-controlled zone closest to a nuclear power plant, two air bombs hit electrical infrastructure within minutes of nightfall. Russia has repeatedly hit Ukraine’s network, and these attacks have intensified this year. Underscoring the ongoing threat, power to the nuclear plant was cut again for three days as rescuers tried to extinguish the fire. According to the World Nuclear Energy Agency, it was at least the seventh time this year that the plant was not using a single power line or generator power.

“Nuclear power plants cannot be disconnected from the grid. It is not intended for this. It is also not designed to operate in cold shutdown mode for that long,” said Darya Dolzikova, a nuclear policy researcher at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accuses Russia of They deliberately attack nuclear power plants. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster on the northern border, nearly 900 kilometers (550 mi) from Zaporizhia, caused rising rates of thyroid disease among Ukrainian children far from the accident site, and radiation contaminated the immediate surroundings before spreading throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere. To this day, the area around the plant, known in Russian as Chernobyl, is an “exclusion zone” to which there is no access except for technical personnel necessary to ensure the safety of the decommissioned facility.

Russian forces took control of Chernobyl in the first days of the invasion, only to be pushed back by Ukrainian forces.

The Zaporozhye power plant has a safer and more modern design than Chernobyl, and the risk of a large-scale meltdown is not as great as experts say. But this does not reduce the risk to zero, and Russia will remain a formidable neighbor even after the end of the war.

An investment that might seem extreme elsewhere is more understandable in Ukraine, said Sam Lair, a researcher at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

“They are there under conventional air and missile attack from the Russians and they have experience that these attacks are not directed solely at military targets,” Lair said. “If I were them, I would build them too.”

In addition, the Zaporozhye Oblast received a donation from the European Union in the amount of 5.5 million iodine tablets, which help block thyroid absorption some radiation.

Since the beginning of the war, Russia has repeatedly referred to its stockpiles of nuclear weapons without eliminating immediate threats. In September, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia would consider any attack by a country backed by a nuclear-armed nation as a joint attack, and stressed that Russia could respond with nuclear weapons against any attack that would pose a “critical threat to our sovereignty.”

Ukrainian officials fear that Russian attacks on Chernobyl and the Zaporozhye nuclear power plants may be just the beginning. During his speech in late September to UN General Assembly, Zelensky warned that Russia is preparing attacks on more nuclear power plants that produce a large part of Ukraine’s electricity.

“If, God forbid, Russia causes a nuclear disaster at one of our nuclear power plants, the radiation will not respect state borders,” Zelensky said.

Underground for the future

The cost of building an underground school system is enormous – the budget of the underground version of Junior High School No. 71 alone is over UAH 112 million ($2.7 million). Most of the funding is provided by international donors, and national and local authorities have made it a priority on par with funding the army.

“Everyone understands that fortification and assistance to the army is priority No. 1,” said Ivan Fedorov, head of the Zaporizhia region. “But if we lose the new generation of our Ukrainians, who (will) we fight for?”

Daria Oncheva, a 15-year-old student of Junior High School No. 71, is looking forward to the underground activities, and not only because she will finally be in the same place as her schoolmates.

“It’s safer than staying remotely at home,” she said.

School 88, on the other side of town, is further away, with rooms cut out and completely lined with concrete thick enough to block the initial radiation attack. The project contractor is also digging trenches for the Ukrainian army. Once completed, it will also be the main bomb shelter in the area, whose single-family homes typically have small orchards and trellised gardens but no basements.

The optimistic schedule assumes that the school will be ready for children in December. It has three layers of reinforcing bars with a total weight of 400 tons of metal and 3,100 cubic meters of reinforced concrete. The building will be covered with almost a meter (yard) of earth, covered with a football pitch and a playground.

The school will be equipped with an air filtration system, two separate electrical lines and the ability to operate independently for three days, along with additional supplies of food and water.

Michael Dillon, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who studies how humans can survive nuclear fallout, said being underground increases survivability by a factor of 10.

But Alicia Sanders-Zakre of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons said that ultimately people can do more – “which means eliminating these weapons rather than… building, or actually not even a band-aid, on the real problem.”

Lyudmila Zlatova, who has been the director of School No. 88 for 30 years, hopes that it will be a facility adapted to the threats that Zaporizhia will face in the future. But she and the parents who gathered on the final day were most concerned about the present, talking on the edge of the excavation as emergency sirens wailed.

A bomb from the front lines reaches the area within 10 seconds, which is far too short a time for evacuation, and bombs land with alarming frequency. The underground school’s sunless rooms and concrete corridors will only make the children more comfortable, considering what they are already going through, she added.

“They will feel better learning without windows,” Zlatova said, looking out at the construction site.

Zlatova believes that thanks to this, at least some families left Zaporizhia and went to other cities in Ukraine or Europe. The city remains fully functional, public transport is operational, grocery stores, markets and restaurants are open, and repairs to structures damaged by shelling are ongoing – although to a limited extent. About 150 of the school’s 650 pre-war students have left the city, but she said she is in contact with absent families and many of them promise to return home as soon as there is a safe place to learn.

Junior High School No. 6, which runs from first grade to high school, already has them. Its main building is located on the easternmost edge of the city, closer than any other school to the front, at a distance of 40 kilometers (25 mi).

It’s no wonder that its director, Kostyantyn Lypski, seems a bit nervous at the beginning of the academic year. But at least his students can attend school because last year parents raised money to renovate the basement, about 50 meters from the main school building, into a series of classrooms.

About 500 people study in his underground school, whose concrete walls and relatively thin metal doors are not resistant to radiation but protect against explosions – the same number as in the new projects. The school has double the number of classes, so students will learn every week. The youngest children study full-time on the first floor of the shelter, and the older ones in the main building.

“Of course it will work,” he said. “We have prepared everything for the start of the new school year.”

In the first days of the school year, an air raid meant he could test that confidence. From the moment the sirens wailed until the last children took their seats and set out their books, five minutes passed while waiting for instructions.

It was morning and they were ready for the day ahead.

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Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza reported from Santa Cruz, California. Alex Babenko contributed from Zaporozhye, Ukraine.

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The Associated Press receives nuclear security coverage from Carnegie Corporation of New York AND Outrider Foundation. AP is solely responsible for all content.

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