Tick, Tick, Tick ...

Chernobyl Reactor No. 4 rises over the mostly abandoned town of Pripyat in Ukraine. JOHN WENDLE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Tick, Tick, Tick ... comes to mind regarding not only Chernobyl but also Zaporizhzhia, the largest nuclear plant in Europe, as both are decaying entries and ... both are under the control of the Russians as the invasion of Ukraine continues.

Welcome to Chernobyl. Welcome to the poisoned place.

In an extraordinary piece of reporting, Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw of the Wall Street Journal bring us inside the derelict Chernobyl nuclear plant in which 200 employees have been working, literally at gunpoint, ever since the Russian army rolled into Ukraine, to try and keep a lid on a potential catastrophe. A single night shift that began on February 23 is now 500 hours long and still going. And these workers are not baking bread. They are reaching zombie-level exhaustion on a job site where, if things go truly sideways, much of eastern Europe becomes a dead zone.

Security-camera footage showed Russian armored vehicles on the grounds of the Chernobyl complex. PHOTO: CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR POWER PLANT, SLAVUTYCH OFFICE

“The psychological situation is deteriorating,” Mr. Heiko said, updating managers in an office 30 miles away, two people on that call recalled. Some technicians, demanding to go home, were threatening to walk out, past the Russian tanks parked outside.

The supervisor, who celebrated his 60th birthday in captivity last week, said it was his duty to toil on as long as required. “Everyone wants to go home, but we know we need to stay.”

Since Feb. 23, Chernobyl’s technicians and support staff have been working nonstop. After arriving at 9 p.m. for a single night shift to monitor electrical transmission levels and the temperature inside the plant’s gigantic sarcophagus housing radioactive waste, they are approaching 500 hours on the job—snatching sleep on chairs in front of beeping machinery and on piles of clothes next to workstations.

Their diet has dwindled to porridge and canned food, prepared by a 70-year-old cook who at one point collapsed from exhaustion. Their phones have been confiscated and they are trailed by Russian soldiers through the nuclear plant’s labyrinth of reinforced-concrete corridors.

Two power stations at Enerhodar, about 50 km from Zaporozhye in Ukraine, viewed from across the Kakhovka Reservoir on the river Dnieper. Photo taken from the "Nikopol" shore. The nearer power station is Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the biggest nuclear power station in Europe, consisting of two cooling towers (one largely obscured by the other) at the left and 6 VVER reactor buildings. The large building between the cooling towers and the reactors, and the two tall smokestacks, are at the Zaporizhzhia thermal power station about 3 km beyond the nuclear plant.

This give one pause as to just how huge Zaporozye truly is.

Addendum - Chernobyl is now off the power grid.