Chris Lange, FISM News
A Ukrainian nuclear official has reported that ingredients used to build a dirty bomb have gone missing from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
Anatolii Nosovskyi, director of the Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP) in Kyiv, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in a recent interview that looters raided a radiation monitoring lab at the defunct nuclear power station, which has been under the control of Russian forces since late February. Nosovskyi said the raiders made off with radioactive isotopes used to “calibrate instruments and pieces of radioactive waste that could be mixed with conventional explosives to form a ‘dirty bomb’ that would spread contamination over a wide area,” according to the report.
Nosovkyi also revealed that a separate lab at the site houses even more dangerous materials, including “powerful sources of gamma and neutron radiation” used to test devices and highly-radioactive samples of material leftover from the Unit Four meltdown. Since he lost contact with the lab last month, Nosovskyi said that “the fate of these sources is unknown to us.”
Russian forces seized control of all Chernobyl facilities shortly after Moscow’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, after soldiers held the staff there hostage for nearly a month. Recently, Russia rotated those employees out and brought in replacements.
The site of the largest nuclear disaster in history, Chernobyl remains a major concern amid the chaos of the war. On March 11, wildfires ignited nearby forests made radioactive by the 1986 disaster, where plants and fungi harbor radioisotopes. Nosovskyi said the fires continue to burn and could become more intense as the weather warms, which could potentially result in a “significant deterioration of the radiation situation in Ukraine and throughout Europe.”
Fears of a possible nuclear disaster have loomed over Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine. In addition to seizing Chernobyl, Russian forces shelled the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant – Europe’s largest nuclear installation – on March 3. Fortunately, the strikes missed its reactor halls.
A separate rocket attack damaged a research reactor at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology two days later.
Nosovskyi refers to the assaults as “nuclear terrorism.”
Separately, Ukraine’s armed forces said Wednesday that there is imminent danger of ammunition exploding at Chernobyl. Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister has called on the United Nations Security Council to demilitarize the Chernobyl exclusion zone and introduce a U.N. mission to “eliminate the risk of the repeat of a nuclear catastrophe.”