To play this audio please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video
When Russia targets Ukraine’s energy system, it’s not just turning off the lights — it’s creating conditions for nuclear disaster. Each attack forces a rethink: more solar, more batteries, more distributed, harder-to-hit systems. For Ukrainians, this isn’t about climate — it’s about survival. What can the rest of the world learn from this?
Subscribe to the podcast here: Living Planet Podlink
Send a voice message to LivingPlanet
TRANSCRIPT:
Shaun Burnie: I wouldn’t say it was that we were scared. It was that we were terrified of the prospects of that happening. 
It takes a lot to scare Shaun Burnie. After 35 years as a nuclear specialist with Greenpeace, the burly Scotsman has worked in some of the most radioactive places on earth. 
Shaun: The scariest point in terms of nuclear was in 2024, autumn 2024.  
Shaun is talking about Ukraine where he now spends most of the year. On August 26, Russia starts firing more than 200 missiles and drones in one of the largest aerial attacks of the war. It systematically pounds energy infrastructure, hitting gas and coal-fired plants, the grid, transformers. Around 8 million homes lose power.  
Russia has been trying to cripple Ukraine’s energy system since it invaded the neighboring country in February 2022. But this is different, says Shaun. Because the Russians started targeting electrical substations. 
Shaun: A nuclear plant that’s connected to the grid requires what’s called grid stability.  
And it’s the substations that keep power flowing in and out. 
Shaun: There’s about 10 of them that are critical to nuclear plant safety.  
But during the Russian attack, the grid begins to buckle. Four reactors disconnect. Plant operators power one down completely.  
Shaun: You were looking at a scenario that really had never been seen in the world before, where multiple reactors would be forced to shut down. Because that instability, the safest option is to shut down the nuclear reactor. And why is that? If you lose electrical power from the grid, it’s called a loss of offsite power, a LOOP, you need to go to your own electricity supply on the plant itself. And in the first instance, that’s emergency diesel generators.   
That needs to happen within minutes, so electricity is delivered to the water pumps keeping the extremely hot reactor and spent fuel cool. But those enormous generators have maybe seven to ten days of fuel. Restarting a reactor takes far more power than they can provide — it has to come from the grid. If that power isn’t restored and fuel runs out or a generator breaks down, cooling systems fail. Within hours, water boils away, exposing the core. Temperatures climb to around 2,700 degrees Celsius — that’s the boiling point of steel. The fuel melts – otherwise known as a core meltdown.  
Shaun: I don’t really get scared, but that was the really serious moment where you go, Ukraine, Russia knows that Ukraine is faced with this horrendous dilemma, shut down the reactors before it’s too late, or keep operating and risk not just one reactor, not even one nuclear power plant, but multiple reactor failures across Ukraine. So multiple Fukushimas, radiologically speaking, potentially multiple Chornobyls.  
That was the worst-case scenario. But the plants regained off-site power. The grid stabilized. And plant operators were able to restart the reactors. 
But the risk hasn’t gone away. 
Ukraine says Russia is still trying to knock their nuclear plants offline — plants that now provide more than half of the country’s electricity. And the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has called the situation… 
Clip: ”The world’s biggest threat to nuclear safety.” 
It’s left some Ukrainians questioning the vulnerability of a highly centralized energy system — and whether nuclear power can ever be truly safe in a time of war. 
Ukraine knows better than most what a nuclear disaster means. 
Lena: Chornobyl is more about the collective memory, because I think everyone in Ukraine has some family stories or community stories about it. And now, during the war, this meaning has become even more real. 
News Clip
On April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant exploded, sending radioactive material across Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes — many never to return. It remains the world’s worst nuclear disaster. 
Lena: And we have to ask ourselves whether it’s…It is reasonable to rely so heavily on technologies where the consequences of failure are so high, especially in such unstable conditions as war.  
I’m Neil King and this is Living Planet. Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s power grid have pushed the country’s energy system to the edge and its nuclear plants to the brink of disaster. We’ll hear how Ukraine is fighting back with an unexpected weapon: renewable energy. Could building out solar and wind essentially make Ukraine and Europe safer? Stay with us.  
Promo break
One of the reasons that worst-case scenario Shaun Burnie described hasn’t happened is the rapid response of nuclear plant workers under immense pressure. Another is the people keeping the grid alive. 
Shaun: the unbelievable work of the Ukraine grid operators, Ukrenergo, personnel from companies like DTEK maintaining the electricity system despite being under assault constantly every night. You know, engineers have died as a direct result of working at these electrical stations, trying to get them repaired and then being hit again.  
The most obvious way to reduce the danger would be for Russia to stop targeting the grid. But as long as those attacks continue, Ukraine is being forced to adapt. 
More than half of the country’s electricity generation capacity has been damaged or destroyed. And the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant — once supplying a quarter of Ukraine’s electricity — remains under Russian control. 
That targeting of big thermal power plants and the centralized grid…  
Chris: Has been a kind of quite stark revelation of the vulnerability of concentrated energy infrastructure. So Russia has fairly brutally targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure across the board. And what they found is that targeting thermal power plants, we’d sort of say is conventional power plants. So, these could be nuclear, coal, gas and so on, where they generate a large quantity of electricity. That is a relatively effective way to cause a lot of damage with relatively few missiles.  
That’s Chris Aylett.  
Chris: I’m a research fellow in the Environment and Society Centre at Chatham House. I work on geopolitics, trade, climate change, and the energy transition.  
Chris says Ukraine isn’t just rebuilding — it’s rethinking how its energy system works. 
Chris: And what they found is that solar, wind and batteries have tended to be the most effective, the fastest and the most kind of secure way of doing that.  
Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK— 
Chris: ran whole fleets of mainly coal-fired power plants prior to the invasion.  
But as they’ve been systematically attacked and DTEK has been trying to repair them  
Chris: They’ve also found themselves doing is bringing in ever increasing quantities of wind and solar and battery because they have found that they tend to be harder to attack and less likely to be even to be targeted by the Russians.  
It’s not just harder but also less economical to target smaller and more spread-out renewable sources, says Chris.  
Chris: I think one statistic that they’ve cited is that it takes one particular missile to take out really a 250 megawatts say coal fired power station, but it would take 40 times that amount of missiles to take out equivalent capacity of wind power generation.  
And wind and solar are cheap, and quicker to install and quicker to repair than a badly damaged coal plant. And unlike a coal plant, if a drone takes out a solar panel, the lights don’t all go out.  
Chris: So, for example, if there is a solar park, if there is damage to that, it doesn’t necessarily need to take everything out because you could swap new panels in.  
Big energy companies and Ukrainian NGOs have all been working to bring more green power online. In 2025, about some 56% of the country’s electricity generation came from nuclear, coal made up 14% and renewables, including hydropower, solar and wind, came in at around  21% — jumping from 12% before the invasion.  
Ukraine has been rolling out small-scale decentralized power — particularly in frontline and high-risk regions — to make the grid harder to knock out and ensure a stable electricity supply to people and businesses. Some of that is smaller gas plants. But a lot of is solar going up on rooftops, municipal buildings, hospitals, and schools. In 2025 alone, Ukraine installed enough to power over a million homes. The goal now is to nearly double that within four years. And the people rolling all that out are doing it under fire.  
Lena: Fortunately, everything was quiet. We only see the military aircraft who are monitoring the sky. 
It’s March 2026. Twenty-five-year-old Lena Kondratiuk is standing in the cold, in total darkness, in the middle of a field somewhere between Ukraine’s capital Kyiv and a town called Mykolaiv — about 60 kilometers (37 miles) from the frontline.  
She looks up.  
Lena: I’ve never, I hadn’t seen such a starry sky for a long time. Of course, I thought that probably I would see such sky in the mountains at my vacation, but it still was really beautiful.  
Lena is standing in this field appreciating the stars because an air raid alarm sounded as the train she was on raced through the darkness. All the passengers have to disembark. It’s a Russian attack. Passenger trains are now a target.  
Lena: We know about that; we know about these risks. And our conversation and dark humor made it lighter. Because, for example, each location I asked myself, it would be better to burn alive or freeze to death? Because that carriage, train carriage burns down completely in nine minutes only. And if you’re outside in zero degrees weather for over an hour, no matter how warmly you dress, you start to freeze. And we spent about two hours outside to talk about this. And fortunately, we didn’t have an answer for this question still.  
It’s the kind of dark humor, Lena says helps Ukrainians deal with the reality of war. When the air raid is over, they board the train again and arrive safely at Mykolaiv for the opening of a solar power plant.  
Lena makes this journey about once a month. She works for the Ukrainian NGO Ecoclub, helping bring solar power and battery storage to communities across the country. The trip takes around 13 hours — if it isn’t interrupted by air raids. 
Lena is the youngest in her family  
Lena: yes, on 30 minutes (laughs)  
She’s got a twin brother, who she says doesn’t really understand her job.  
Lena: that I am just sitting with my laptops and doing something.  
Lena joined Ecoclub at 18, after her older sister encouraged her to volunteer. 
Lena: I didn’t have any expectation on it because I had started to study at the university.  
She thought she would become an engineer. Steady work, well paid. But when she started volunteering, she saw  
Lena: how these people love this work and what the impact of this work is, I understood that I want to have a job with real social impact in the world.  
Just before the pandemic, she takes on a role as an analyst. At that point, Ecoclub is focused on advocacy — pushing for renewable energy. 
Then, February 24, 2022. 
Atmo: News clip 
Lena: I was also scared and shocked because I didn’t believe that it can happen in 2022. I didn’t believe the news that all said that it will happen. 
The invasion changes everything. The team pivots — first to humanitarian aid, then, as blackouts spread across the country, to energy. 
Lena: We have started the campaign called Solar Aid for Ukraine because we see that Russia has started to shell the energy infrastructure.  
For Ukrainians, the constant, loud whir of diesel generators are now a familiar sound. They’re not only noisy, but polluting, and the fuel needed to run them keeps getting more expensive. Ecoclub and its largely European donors want to replace those with solar and batteries. And Lena is asked to step up as project manager — getting those renewable energy projects off the ground. She’s just 21.  
Lena: Actually, I was really scared to take this responsibility because I wasn’t sure that I can. I agreed to this offer because of the war, because I understand that, for example, I can die tomorrow.  
It’s a stark realization for someone so young. But like so many Ukrainians, she has learned to live with the knowledge that everything can change in a moment. She’s built routines to hold onto — morning runs, followed by long breakfasts with coffee.  
Lena: Because if I do that, I feel this stability because I don’t have stability at any time in my life. And even if I have like a plan for a year for all my projects at work, I see that in the end of the year, all my plans was not as I planned. I need to create a new way, for example, to do other activities or there is a shelling or some damage I need to replace. And it’s really, it’s really hard, but It’s a lesson learned for everyone in Ukraine is you should to adapt.  
Since then, Lena has helped bring nearly 90 solar power systems online across Ukraine. 
Traveling through a country at war wasn’t easy at first. She lives in Rivne, in the west — far from the front. 
Her first trip to Mykolaiv, just 60 kilometers from the fighting, was daunting. 
Lena: I’ve never been in Mikolayev before the war, I was checked all the information, how far away Mikolayev from the front line. How often air alarms happened? How often shelling it? And actually it’s only 60 kilometers from front line and I was really scared to go there.  
While Lena was there, the city was shelled by the Russians. 
Lena: There is no electricity, sounds of diesel generator. And I thought that I don’t I didn’t want to come back to the city because I’m scared, I have the anxiety about it.  
But Lena did go back.  
Lena: I met a lot of kind people in Mikolayev and I see how the people even near the front lines can live. They continue to work, they continue to have the normal weekend, they continue to have the dreams and plan their life in the future. and they teach that even during such a war time it’s still possible to find happy moments in your life and continue it.  
The city also reminds her of Mariupol, which was under a brutal Russian siege for months but where Lena spent  
Lena: spent summer holidays when I was at school. And it was very, because my relative lives there, but unfortunately Mariupol now is occupied. And it reminds me about my also relatives at Mariupol. 
In Mykolaiv, Lena says solar and batteries are helping utilities to keep water flowing during blackouts and ensure hospitals can keep caring for patients and doing surgeries even when the grid goes down. Sometimes blackouts can last up to 16 hours and locals will turn up at the facilities that have solar— to charge their phones and, in winter, get warm.  
Lena: Renewable energy in Ukraine is not about the climate and sustainability; it’s about surviving now because we see how the water utilities and hospitals need this electricity during the power outages. And for each Ukrainians it’s about the access to the basic needs.  
One project particularly close to her heart brought solar power to a long-stay care home for women with mental health and neurological issues. Before the solar panels, staff were waking up at 4am to get breakfast ready before the power cuts. Blackouts shaped the entire day — often no hot meals, no TV, sometimes no electricity at all. 
Lena: And after that they were happy because they have like access to everything. They can watch TV in every hours of day when they want to do it and it was really grateful and happy to see the smiles of their faces.  
Lena says the solar plant has also helped the home save money to put into improving conditions for the people living there — who are often overlooked by the Ukrainian government. 
Lena: This project discovered for me that I thought that I didn’t and I am not empathetic person, but I am because every time when I visit this facility, was I wanted to give everything that I want and help them as my best because I see how these people are vulnerable and how they need our help of it.  
In January 2026 alone, Russia fired more than 6,000 attack drones, 5,500 aerial bombs and 158 missiles at Ukrainian infrastructure — repeatedly targeting thermal power plants, electricity substations and district heating facilities. Ukrainians are already dreading the next winter. The last one was the harshest in 16 years, with temperatures dropping to minus 21 Celsius. Things were particularly bad on the frontlines, where families live in damaged homes, with unreliable heating and electricity. Even in Rivne, in her office, Lena felt it.  
Lena: We spent a day at the office with winter coat on ourselves, with hats, with hat and even with gloves because it was really cold and not only outside but also inside. 
Lena also lives with blackouts, though not as frequently as in other parts of the country — often outages are scheduled, and she plans her day accordingly, having important meetings and doing work around those. Last winter some colleagues in other parts of Ukraine had to work 
Lena: in the evening or even in the night because it’s only the time when they have the electricity to do it. 
Aside from changes to her work day, Lena says her reading habits significantly have improved and  
Lena: talking about the Netflix I download series over movies for my phone and watching later and I buy additional power banks for home I try to cook food in a few days not only for one day I try to use food which don’t need to cook a lot or use electronic devices. Or I also started to often visit, for example, my family, my parents at the home because they have electricity and like, hi mom, I will visit you today for the dinner.  
For Ukrainians, the priority is simple: keep the lights and heat on. That has meant keeping nuclear plants running throughout the war, despite the risks. So far, they’ve operated without major incident. Without them, experts say Ukraine would be in a far worse position, considering how much of its fossil fuel plants have been knocked offline.  
Lena: But we see that solar power alone can’t cover electricity demand in the winter. They can help in the summertime a lot, but in the winter we should find another way to help to survive communal facilities in Ukraine.  
Alongside expanding renewables, Ukraine is also planning at least nine new nuclear reactors. Some being built in the country’s west, and others in the south — partly to compensate for the loss of the Zaporizhzhia plant occupied by Russia. That would bring around 11.25 gigawatts online. The cost of one reactor would be at least $5 billion. In a recent survey, 80% of Ukrainians supported the nuclear plans and 95% backed renewables expansion.  
So is the lesson no nuclear in the future energy mix? It depends on who you ask. Lena and Greenpeace’s Shaun Burnie say countries, including Ukraine, should concentrate on expanding solar and wind with industrial and small-scale battery storage as much as they can.  
Lena: And for me it’s not, of course, saying that nuclear energy is bad, because even now part of energy system depends on the nuclear power in Ukraine, but it clearly shows the importance of diversification and decentralization of energy in Ukraine.  
But at the same time 
Shaun: Pretty much all the G7  
That’s Germany, France, Canada, the US, Japan, Italy and the UK,  
Shaun: are saying we need to build nuclear plants but they also made a statement I guess because they’re not called out by people saying well hang on a second. You’re saying let’s build lots of nuclear but on the other hand you’re saying because of the lessons of Ukraine we need to decentralize. Okay, what one do you really believe? My own sense is that the energy transition, that train has already left the station. We’re moving towards a massive rollout, even greater rollout of renewable energy. economics, basically, that wins on this.  
In the short term, they also want tougher sanctions on Russia’s nuclear industry, similar to ones for oil, gas and coal. Countries like Hungary and Slovakia still buy uranium from Rosatom — the state company that occupies nuclear power plant Zaporizhzhia. The say banning it would threaten their energy security. The EU is looking for alternatives, but has no firm timeline. 
Chris has been looking at what others can learn from Ukraine when it comes to energy resilience. For him, the main lessons from Russia’s war in Ukraine when it comes to energy – lessons that the European Union is also paying attention to – is a better geographical spread of infrastructure.  
Chris: And yeah, that is pretty much basically agnostic on the power generation source.  
While nuclear and fossil fuel plants are still doing a lot of heavy lifting in Ukraine, diversifying and decentralizing energy supply, with a lot of renewables and storage is another big lesson.  
Chris: The sort of initial impetus between behind rolling out renewable energy and electrification was, you know, tackling climate change by reducing greenhouse greenhouse gas emissions, which is really important still. But at the same time, sort of post the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a huge in response to that, a huge deployment of renewables as Europe realized we need to be less reliant on gas. We know it’s a very it’s a really fossil fuel poor continent and it was never going to have anywhere near enough to meet its own needs.  
Global instability — including oil price spikes linked to conflict in the Strait of Hormuz — could only sharpen Europe’s desire to move away from fossil fuel imports and gain more energy independence through decarbonizing. Another lesson is making sure 
Chris: You’ve got the right components. You’ve got stockpiles of these components. That’s not things like, I wouldn’t say that’s things like stockpiling sort of critical minerals. It’s more like the, you know, the vital parts of your system that keep everything turned on.  
And those components should all be standardized for easy replacement and quick replacement – meaning restoration takes days instead of weeks. But back to the question – do we need nuclear? Chris is very optimistic about where renewables are headed and how fast. Batteries are getting cheaper and advances are being made in the duration of long-term storage, grids just need building out and adapting – that’s the big bottleneck.  
His view is  
Chris: There’s this narrative of scarcity with renewables at the moment. There’s not going to be enough. Actually, we’re not too far away from there being too much on some levels.  
For its part, Ukraine wants to phase out coal by 2035 and to reach 27% renewables in final energy consumption by 2030.  On nuclear, Chris is pragmatic rather than prescriptive — Ukraine is dependent on it. As is France, which has over 50 reactors, and that’s not changing soon.  
Chris: I’m not sure I would necessarily say we should, know, you know, one or the other government should invest tens of billions in a new nuclear plant rather than renewables and batteries. I think you’d have to think very carefully about that. But I do think that it’s part of the European energy mix at the moment. And I don’t see why that wouldn’t continue. You just need to be quite careful about thinking it can deliver all these benefits, and I think there is potentially an argument that you and this has been sort of shown with the Ukraine experience you do want to have some diversity.  
Chris says there’s still debate in energy systems modeling — some scenarios get to 100% renewables, others closer to 90%. But he thinks the real point is often missed. There’s no silver bullet.  
Chris: I mean, it’s actually a really interesting exercise, but ultimately you just want to build out as much low carbon as you can. And you want to make it as secure as you can while you’re doing it.  
So basically, trying to derisk the dangers of running nuclear power in a war, moving away from buying nuclear fuel from Rosatom, and also bolstering your renewables against cyber-attacks, for example.  
Chris: It’s awful but it’s been it’s almost been a laboratory of what can happen and I think it’s really important that Europe and other countries as well do draw the right lessons because otherwise it’s almost an insult. They’ve gone through this terrible experience, they’re continuing to go through it, they’ve shown amazing sort of ingenuity at rebuilding fast and it’s told us a lot about what’s vulnerable and what you need to consider and what could be targeted. It’s actually really, really important that Europe does take these lessons on board.  
Lena says she’s glad she was born long after Chornobyl — even as she lives through a different kind of disaster in Ukraine, one she doesn’t expect to end soon.  
Lena: Unfortunately, in this question I am a pessimist.  
But Lena and others in Ukraine are looking to what  happens after the war. 
Lena: I still want to help my country, still want to continue my work at the Ecoclub and I still think that even after the war and after our victory there would be even more work compared to now because we have to rebuild the country and rebuild it in greener and better way.  
Credits
Every Friday, Living Planet brings you the stories, facts and debates on the key environmental issues of our time.

source