VIENNA, April 4. /TASS/. It is yet unclear what caused the 330kV reserve power supply line feeding the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) to disconnect, but the incident occurred against the backdrop of military activities in the region, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) General Director Rafael Grossi said in a statement.

"The cause of the latest outage was not immediately clear, but it followed reports of military activity in the region and beyond. This was also confirmed by the IAEA team on the ground who heard numerous rounds of outgoing artillery fire this morning," the official said in a statement, posted on the organization’s website.

Grossi added that over the past two years, the NPP was disconnected from its power supply sources on many occasions, and those incidents once again underline "the very real dangers facing this major facility."

The latest outage occurred at 10:06 a.m. local time (8:06 a.m. GMT) on Thursday. Currently, the station relies on the main 750 kV line.

Located in the city of Energodar, the Zaporozhye NPP is Europe’s largest nuclear power plant and has six power units with an aggregate capacity of 6 GW. Russian forces took control of the facility in February 2022. Since then, Ukrainian troops have been periodically shelling both the city and the plant’s territory. Five of the plant’s units have been in a state of cold shutdown and one - in the state of hot shutdown since September 2022.

The power plant was completely cut off from external power supply sources eight times since August 2022, with the latest such incident reported in December 2023. Earlier this year, the auxiliary 330kV line was also disconnected for the period of three weeks, but the main 750 kV line remained operational during this period.