A whole other kettle of fission: Ukraine’s imperilled nuclear plant

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In New York, I'm John Fassman.

And in London, I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Athletic shoes used to be worn by athletes during athletic pursuits. These days, though, they're worn by almost everyone, almost everywhere. That has led to strong growth, but makers of athletic gear may find tougher times ahead.

And why is it that tales of teenage angst suit horror films so well? We peek through our fingers at the latest film to examine the unease of adolescence and the gruesomeness of growing up. But first, For nine months now, war has raged in Ukraine. And for much of that time, Russian troops have been occupying the nuclear power plant in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia. It's nothing more than luck that haphazard shelling hasn't caused any accidents at the facility.

A team of UN Inspectors have finally arrived at Europe's largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine.

That's right, but the Russians who do.

It took until September for outside officials to get a look at just how perilous the situation was. And on Monday, following yet another weekend of shelling, those same officials reported new damage at the complex.

The head of the UN Nuclear watchdog has condemned the latest shelling of Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Rafael Grossi said that the attack was another close call with shells, explaining Igor.

Konoshenkov, a spokesman for Russia's Defense Ministry, said the strikes had come from an area controlled by Ukrainian forces. Ukraine's President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Russian troops should leave the area and stop shelling the plan. Never mind the finger pointing. The plant is occupied and in a precarious state, a danger to people within and far beyond Ukraine's borders.

Russia took over the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in early March, during their initial advance into Ukraine.

Wendell Stevenson writes about Ukraine for the Economist.

It's the largest nuclear power facility in Europe. It has six reactors. And there was some confused and difficult fighting to take that. There was shelling of the plant and some fires, and it caused a lot of consternation and fear at the time. Things settled down a little bit, and they've been trying to exert technical administrative control over it ever since, but they've mostly failed. Then as the frontline hardened just to the north of that, the shelling and fighting has continued, and the power plant has really found itself on the front lines of this war.

What do you mean that it's ended up on the front line of this war?

Well, right from the beginning, it's been very clear that Russia's wanted to take over Ukraine, take over its infrastructure and the prizes that it can get. It's wanted to annex the territory. And the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is a huge part of that. It would be a pearl, a gem, if they could get it. So what they've been trying to do is twofold. One, to uncouple it from the Ukrainian grid and attach it to the Russian controlled electrical grid coming up from Crimea, and the second is also to assume administrative control over it. So it is still technically and administratively under the control and authority of the Ukrainian Nuclear Energy Agency. But the Russians have continuously put pressure on the staff to sign contracts with a new Russian energy company that has been promulgated to take over the plant. This coincided with the political annexations that were going on as well. This is a sort of last ditch, desperate scratching way for the Russians to impose political and administrative control over the plant as well as technical control.

And how's that been going? How successful have they been over the.

Course of this war? They failed to take its electricity for their own use. The plant usually provides about 20% of Ukraine's electricity, but they've shut down reactor after reactor. At one point over the summer, there were two reactors that were still working and providing electricity to the Ukrainian grid. And essentially what happened is that the Russians ended up using the power plant as a military base. It's a huge complex with many different buildings and underground bunkers and turbine halls. They understood that the Ukrainians would hesitate and not want to shell this sensitive area. And so they used it as a sort of protective bunker or base, as you like, but at the same time using it also as cover to shell the opposite side of the Dnipro River. And the Ukrainians, meanwhile, have also been Shelling the Russians trying to avoid the power plant, to hit them in command posts and ammunition dumps and bases, because the Russians have fanned out into surrounding villages and also garrisoned the town of Inohoder adjacent.

And what about all the people who had run the plant before the invasion?

One of the factors that's been the most distressing is the continuing and increasing reports of really violent intimidation by Russian authorities on the plant of the workers and employees themselves. When I talked to the mayor of Enohadar, Dmytro Orlov, he told me that over the course of the occupation, I think it's almost nine months now, about 1,000 people, plant employees and residents of his town, have been detained by the Russians. So considering that there remains only a population of about 15,000 out of a previous war population of over 50,000, that's a lot. They have kidnapped, detained, tortured, intimidated, shot senior management and workers and employees on the plant. Many have gone into hiding. The people that have got out have reported that they're held underground in cells under the plant and off the site as well. This is really alarming and increasingly beginning, I think, to threaten the ability of the staff to continue their work and at the plant and to cope with the ongoing maintenance issues of trying to keep a nuclear plant safe.

What do you mean by that though? What are the sort of immediate risks to safety here?

Well, since September, all six nuclear reactors have been shut down. Four of them in what they call cold shutdown and two in what they call hot shutdown, which means that they're still producing a little bit of steam, but are essentially not functioning, not producing any electricity. But what happens on a nuclear power plant, you need to constantly maintain conditions and it's a sensitive ecosystem where you have a lot of nuclear fuel that needs to be kept cool. You need to maintain safety procedures and monitoring equipment. You need to be able to have filters and to scrub radioactive particles from the air, and you need to have electricity to do that. Now, due to shelling and other damages, the plant has suffered five times a complete blackout, a total rupture of connection to the Ukrainian electrical grid. They've had to go on to back up diesel generators. There has been no particular breach of security protocol, but it's an ongoing risky, concerning situation. And at the moment, as I was told, there is only one, for example, of the large high voltage lines out of four connected to the electrical grid in Ukraine. The Russians have consistently tried to connect the plant to the Russian grid coming up from Crimea and failed. I think there's been a Lot of damage to substations in the southern Zaporizhzhian area to try and prevent that. So they're really stuck with a sort of faltering, difficult and precarious electricity supply and increasingly difficult supplies of diesel to the plant.

And just for the sake of exploring this, what does the worst case scenario look like?

The Ukrainians are extremely concerned that the worst case scenario could be a very bad nuclear accident several times in the order of the Chernobyl accident incident in 1986. At the moment, things seem to be holding there with shelling over the weekend. There are several observers from the International Atomic Energy Agency on site, and they have reassured the world that at the moment there aren't any safety breaches caused by the most recent shelling, but it's an ongoing precarious situation. Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has been trying to create a 30 kilometer demilitarized zone around the plant. The Russians, Nicholas, to say, considering it's a very strategic, important place for them of refusing to do that because it would be essentially a military withdrawal. But that's the Ukrainian position. That's what they're pushing for, and that's what I think everybody's hoping for. But it's clearly not something the Russians want to do.

So it sounds like what amounts to a kind of unstable stalemate here. Do you see it being resolved and how?

Well, it's difficult to know. Nobody's making any predictions this week in a war that's increasingly becoming dynamic and kinetic. And there are some suggestions that the Russians are putting more forces into Zaporizhzhia and closer around the park because they expect possibly a Ukrainian advance. I was talking to the mayor of Enohodar, who's now in Ukrainian territory, but in contact with people inside the city, and he is talking about hearing stories of the Russians beginning to loot, The Russians beginning to walk around the town in civilian clothes and so forth. And it sort of sounds like there's an increasing desperation, there's an increasing movement. There's a sense that things are beginning to shift in that part of the country. It's quite possible that the Russians aren't there for very long, and it's quite possible that they. They're sensing that.

Wendell, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

For most of human history, people have run barefoot or perhaps in whatever shoes they had on. But today, sports shoes are a huge business. The idea of a specialized sneaker really took off in the 60s.

The action shoes only PFS have the action wedge built right in so you run your fastest and jump your highest.

Realizing there was a market for it, companies pumped money into researching the best shoe designs, adding supportive cushioning, more flexible rubber and better performance. Soon a few big brands took off at famous footwear.

It's easy to find the right sport shoe at the right price.

All these brands, Puma, Brooks, Adidas, Famous.

Footwear, good prices on great shoes.

The game changed in the 80s when some brands partnered with sports heroes like Michael Jordan.

On September 15, Nike created a revolutionary new basketball shoe. Air Jordans from Nike.

But lately there's been another shift away from athletes in sport toward collaborations with big names and culture. It's been a hugely successful venture, but with one big risk.

When Ye first partnered with Adidas in 2013. So back when he was called Kanye west, the company's executives would have been very excited indeed.

Ore Augunbee is the Economist consumer correspondent.

They went on to create an extremely successful partnership. Together with a line of sneakers known as Yeezy, the shoes added 1.5 billion euros to Adidas revenues in 2021, which is about 12% of their entire shoe business. Actually, some analysts estimate that it brings in more than half of Adidas profits. But this success has put the company at the mercies of a man who kind of revels in controversy. Recently Ye went on an anti Semitic tirade with tweets and interviews that got him booted off of Twitter and Instagram. Yet all the while he was pretty confident of one thing.

The thing about me and Adidas is.

Like I could literally say anti Semitic shit and they can't drop me.

I could say anti Semitic things and.

Adidas can't drop me.

Now what?

Now what?

Well, now Adidas has dropped him.

What impact has that had on the company?

So following the announcement, Adidas share prices fell to lows that we haven't seen since 2016. They had to cut profit forecasts for the fourth time this year. And it's not just Adidas. The whole 300 billion euro sports shoe industry is facing massive hurdles beyond just misbehaving rappers. Even Nike, the industry's biggest firm, is being forced to restrategize.

Tell us about those hurdles.

Well, I think the biggest one is probably the high inventory costs which are tightening profit margins. As the post pandemic sportswear demand is kind of waning. Inflation is also eating away at shoppers pockets. We're seeing stagnation in the Chinese markets, which is also really hurting some of these brands. I mean, Nike is now having to Slash prices to shift stock that was literally flying off of the shelves last year. And all the while, designer sneakers are susceptible to the whims of changes in fashion. And there's a sense that they've lost track of their core product, which is sports shoes.

So do you think their shift to non athlete celebrity endorsements has started to backfire?

Well, quite possibly. Legacy brands have veered away from an athletic focus in favor of a more trendy one. And this is epitomized by what we've seen with Yeezy. Adidas became overly dependent on it and now it's come to an abrupt end and they're paying the price in the sporting void that they've left behind. We're now seeing a number of fast scaling competitors who are entering the field. There's a Swiss brand, for example, called On Running, which tennis legend Roger Federer backs. They make fully recyclable trainers from beans, as in the edible kind. And I spoke to one of the co founders, David Alleman, who says it's all about the feel and the grassroots recommendations from athletes.

One thing is you hear of it from a friend. So on has and is very much a grassroots brand that is carried by the community. And so people who are big fans of that running sensation, they normally rave about it. And on average they recommend to three.

To five friends On Running launched a subscription service to replace well worn shoes and appeal to the more environmentally conscious. Now half their sales come from America. And there's also other brands like Lululemon, whose results were boosted by a successful footwear launch this year, and Hoka's shoes, which are kind of supposed to be ugly, but they sell for their really chunky cushioning.

Is this an existential threat, do you think, for the bigger brands? I mean, are cues around the block for the latest Nike shoes going to be a thing of the past?

Well, perhaps. Although it's worth mentioning, Nike seems to be holding up pretty okay given the current harsh environment. But the increasingly fragmented market has definitely spooked some of these legacy brands. So Nike, for example, is going more aggressively direct to consumer in order to regain their pricing power. We're seeing smaller brands like Fila revamping old bestsellers and collaborating with innovative small brands like Tala, for example. But Adidas, which welcomes a new boss next year, will need to think big. The company is predicting a 250 million euros hit to revenues this year alone, and that's just from the Yeezy loss. But they'd probably do well to focus more on performance, sport a Tactic, which works pretty well for Puma. But if Adidas don't find a way to set themselves apart in the space, their margins are going to keep shrinking for a while yet.

All right, Orey, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me, John.

Being a teenager and going through adolescence is in itself a horrifying experience. Your body changes, your attitude to the world changes, the way people react to you change, and your wants and desires become dominant.

John Bleasdale writes about films for the Economist.

Luca Guadagnino's new film, Bones and All is basically a story, as if somebody had said Romeo and Juliet, but cannibals.

You could tell in the story. I smelt you too. I didn't know I could do that.

This isn't the first horror film to use the teenage experience as its backdrop. Teenagers have often been the victims of horror films. Slasher movies are rich with a whole crowd of screaming teenagers. Slumber parties are massacred and summer camps are destroyed as serial killers run rampant. But this kind of horror film is a little bit different because here we have the idea of the teenager not as the victim, but instead as someone who, through a transformation, can become a much more powerful agent. In fact, these films are much more like power fantasies. I'm thinking of Gingersnaps.

You play with your new friends and I'll play with mine.

In which a teenager becomes a werewolf. The Lost Boys are near dark.

Don't ever invite a vampire into your house, you silly boy. It renders you powerless.

In which teenagers join with vampires to become the cool kids on the block. And of course, the most famous and popular perhaps of this kind of genre. The Twilight series, starring Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.

Your skin is pale white and ice cold. Your eyes change color, and sometimes you speak like. Like you're from a different time.

Body horror might well be the feeling you get when you look in the mirror at times. But it's also a particular subgenre of horror, usually typified by the works of people like David Cronenberg.

You smell bad.

I've never been much of a bather.

It basically is a way of looking at our bodies with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. Changes can become strange, organic, morphing.

I've become free. I've been released, and you can't stand it.

A film like the Fly, for instance, would be a great example of a body horror in which the mutations of Jeff Goldblum's transported scientist who gets accidentally mixed with a fly, his changes become a sort of pathology and in the time of the 80s when it was released, a metaphor for the AIDS crisis. When it comes to teenagers, they are following puberty, discovering whole new relationships with their own bodies and with other people's bodies. That relationship can include sexuality, of course, and the idea of this new sexuality can be terrifying. Usually this is shown in terms of something like, say, Teen Wolf, for instance, where unwanted hair becomes being a werewolf, wanting to have sex in Twilight becomes vampirism. The originality of Bones and All is that it doesn't go for the usual stock characters of horror, zombies, vampires, werewolves, but instead introduces a new the Eater.

I don't usually talk to anyone after.

I don't actually meet many others.

Sort of Glad not to.

Yeah, I get it.

I'm just saying I'm not an asshole. Should probably go anyway. Up close so you can see blood.

An Eater is a cannibal with various supernatural elements. Although this is very subtly done, Essentially it's someone who has a hunger for human flesh. And the problem with Marin, the protagonist played by Taylor Russell, is she discovers that this bloodlust is something that she cannot control. There are moral questions. How can she satisfy her lust when it necessarily involves killing people? Part of a solution is offered by Mark Rylance's older eater, who basically hangs around and waits for old people to die before noshing on their remains. But here, Marin's hunger is analogous and similar to hunger's that might be played out in sexuality. For instance, do you deny repress your identity or do you let it go, regardless of the social impact that it might have? Being a cannibal is different from having a gender identity or a sexuality, but it is a fantasy nightmare which allows us to play out our preoccupations, our worries, and indeed our dreams of living our own identities to the fullest.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcastconomist.com and you.

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