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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

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.

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.