Russia will restart the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant—occupied by Moscow’s troops since the beginning of their three-year-old invasion of Ukraine—as soon as “military and political conditions allow it,” Alexei Likhachev, head of Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom, said last week in remarks reported by Russian state media.

An apparent plan to push the plant back into service could be approved within the next six weeks, Likhachev told state channel Rossiya 24 in a widely quoted interview, saying it would address issues of licensing the plants six reactors as well schemes for fueling them and distributing their electricity.

But bringing the plant—which sits on the Dnipro River athwart the front lines of the war—back online would freshen worries about a nuclear accident at a facility that has come under fire numerous times since Moscow’s invasion began. A Bellona report from last year considered these concerns when Russia first began airing the notion of bringing the besieged facility back online to produce power.

Yet, even beyond the technical dangers of doing so, argues Dmitry Gorchakov, a nuclear expert with Bellona and author of that report, a potential renewal of the plant’s operations under Russian control would mark a new and more dire challenge the principles governing nuclear energy worldwide.

“If Russia launches and starts operating someone else’s station, this will be a new stage in the destruction of the international nuclear safety system, normalizing the taking of nuclear facilities as military trophies,” he said.

Likhachev’s remarks were some of his first that seemed to publicly acknowledge that Rosatom does indeed intend to absorb the Zaporizhzhia plant—Europe’s largest civilian nuclear power facility—into its enormous bureaucracy, making it the 12^th nuclear power plant under Moscow’s direct control. It would also mark a stunning appropriation of several billion dollars’ worth of Ukrainian nuclear energy infrastructure—a first in modern warfare.

Throughout the war, Rosatom has held itself at something of an arm’s length from the embattled plant, announcing as recently as last May that it had no plans to restart the plants six reactors, which have remained in various stages of shutdown for safety reasons since early in the invasion. But signals on this count have been mixed, with President Vladimir Putin himself telling the International Atomic Energy Agency only a month before that Russia would, in fact, restart the plant.

“Clearly, discussions of a restart have surfaced against the backdrop of discussions on a possible settlement of the military conflict in Ukraine and negotiations toward this with the United State,” said Gorchakov. “Most likely, a ‘suitable military and political situation’ for restart means reaching diplomatic agreements leading, on the one hand, to a cease-fire, including around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, and on the other, to a consolidation of  Russia’s control over the captured territories and plant itself.”

But Gorchakov also pointed out that any reactor restart at the Zaporizhzhia plant — which, prior to its seizure by Russian forces provided a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity — would present huge technical challenges.

For one, the massive outflow of Ukrainian technicians since the Russian seizure has slashed staff numbers from 11,000 before the war to a skeleton crew of about 3,000.

The plant itself has also undergone numerous changes since 1991, when the Soviet collapse left Ukraine as an independent country. The enormous Soviet-built complex has undergone a profound westernization and now runs on European Union-funded computer systems as well as — more recently — reactor fuel from the US-based Westinghouse Corporation.

These conversions baffle Russian staff who are used to Soviet designs, making any reactor restarts an unsafe proposition.

To bring any reactors back online, their core temperatures would have to be raised hundreds of degrees and a scarce supply of technicians would have to check a maze of pipes and pumps for leaks. So dwindled are the personnel numbers that as few as a single technician might oversee an entire reactor control room, a report by the US Department of Energy said.

The report added that Russian staff at the plant are underqualified to operate Ukrainian variants of the Russian-designed VVER-type reactors that make up the Zaporizhzhia plant.

Water from the Dnipro River could also be challenging to come by following the 2023 Russian attack on the Khakhovka Dam complex, which feeds some of the reservoirs that cool the Zaporizhzhia plant.

But Gorchakov pointed out that these would all become Russia’s problems.

“An immediate restart of the station for Russia will mean the final consolidation of this station for itself as wells as an increase in the stakes and risks should conflict or military actions resume near the plant,” he said.

But he added that Rosatom could be driven to push this fragile situation in hopes of minimizing the financial losses seizing the plant, which, he says, “is only a source of expenses and headaches” for the corporation.  

Much depends on how the international community responds to what amounts to the blatant theft of an entire nuclear power plant, Gorchakov added.

“Unfortunately, there is no certainty of serious protest against such a decision, including from the IAEA,” he said.