While I was trying my best to coax a gentle chill from the early autumn air instead of turning on my air-conditioner in the interest of reducing carbon dioxide emissions as stipulated in the Paris Agreement, Russia and Ukraine were recklessly slinging bombs at each other around the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant.

By now, the war has progressed for a whole year without any sign of ending. Politicians and economists around the world constantly calculate gains and losses, but they may not know that a bigger player has long been paying the toll. She is Mother Earth. A bomb is capable of emitting pollutants far more harmful than mere carbon dioxide, including nitrogen oxide, sulfuric acid mist, tetranitromethane, and more. Anyone can imagine the contaminative effect of a whole year’s worth of exploded bombs. All toxic chemical substances – sooner or later – challenge most people to consider their destructive impact, but Mother Earth is the one that takes the longest to absorb it. Every innocent creature who lives in the unfortunate conflict zone has also paid a steep price for a whole year of bombings. Lost in the visual brutality of war, the emission of CO2 has become the least mentioned consequence of the war. Targets set in the Paris Agreement seem cast aside.

However, a terminator may be on the way. The Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant, as the biggest atomic energy generating facility in Europe, supplies one fifth of Ukraine’s electricity. From the viewpoint of securing environmental protection, nuclear power is indeed the most ideal resource to produce energy needed by mankind, featuring cleanness, no CO2 emissions, lower operating cost, and other benefits. But things have a way of going the opposite way in wartime. Both sides want to earn warrior cred in sensational ways like hurling bombs around nuclear plants.

The United Nations nuclear energy watchdog raised the alarm on an increasingly precarious situation in September 2022, warning that cutting off the Ukrainian electric grid proximate to the plant would cause an unsustainable condition. In fact, the infrastructure needed to maintain functioning of the plant’s essential cooling systems had been destroyed by shelling, forcing the facility to rely on emergency reserves not designed to keep it going for long. How urgent was this situation, exactly?  Consider that Zaporizhzhya has two more reactors than Chernobyl.

Although October saw the recovery of external power for the massive nuclear power station, the war had long raged on. While so many other countries and their people spared no effort to protect our environment just for the sake of staying true to the Paris Agreement and also to Mother Earth, the war was not abating. Since war is attributed to human stupidity, it is not the way to seal the ultimate fate of the Earth and that of the creatures who dwell upon it.

Works Cited

Kramer, Andrew E. “Ukraine Signals It Will Keep Battling for Bakhmut to Drain Russia” The New York Times, Available: nytimes.com/2023/03/06/world/europe/bakhmut-ukraine-russia-siege.html March 6, 2023

Olson, Carly. “The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has external power again, the U.N. watchdog agency says.” The New York Times, Available: nytimes.com/2022/09/08/world/europe/zaporizhia-nuclear-plant.html Oct.9,2022

Santora, Marc. “Conditions at Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant Are ‘Unsustainable,’ U.N. Watchdog Warns” The New York Times, Available: nytimes.com/2022/10/09/world/europe/ukraine-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-power-plant-power.html Sept.8,2022.

UN.com. “Ukraine: ‘Physical integrity’ of Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant ‘has been violated several times” Available: news.un.org/en/story/2022/09/1125981 Sep.2 2022