Drone Strike Kills Worker at Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant as IAEA Director Grossi Condemns Attacks

Analysis
Drone strikes are killing Zaporizhzhia personnel fast enough to threaten the plant's ability to staff maintenance and cooling. This is the third reported plant-worker death since October 29, and a thermal plant worker died the same day, so the pattern reaches the power infrastructure feeding the site. The plant ran on diesel generators during its roughly 10-hour loss of the sole 330-kV line on November 8, so another outage would again test emergency systems. It is unlikely that the IAEA reports a complete loss of off-site power at the plant between November 11 and November 30. Confidence is high because the IAEA reports directly and four outlets corroborate it, though the IAEA does not attribute the strikes and Russian-installed management blames Ukraine. The deaths may instead reflect opportunistic strikes on commuting vehicles in Enerhodar, which would say little about the plant's power security. If off-site power fails, the IAEA and Ukraine's grid operators would treat diesel as the primary cooling source and press for emergency repair access. Otherwise monitoring stays on staffing and the single line.