Radioactive ingredients that could be used in the making of a dirty bomb have gone missing from a Chernobyl monitoring lab. The Russian-occupied nuclear power plant and disaster zone were occupied by Russian forces at the start of March and since then a flurry of issues have hit the site.
A barrage of problems has hit the site since its Russian takeover, with the Daily Star reporting of vital repairs needed on the site and Russian soldiers overworking staff. The most recent development indicates that insecure and radioactive materials that could make a “dirty bomb” have been reported missing from a monitoring lab.
Initial worries over missing material were reported by Ukraine’s Director of Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP), Anatolii Nosovskyi who reported several raids on surrounding Chernobyl labs. Nosovskyi claimed looters had made off with radioactive isotopes used to calibrate instruments and pieces of radioactive waste that, when mixed with explosives, could make a “dirty bomb”.
The odds of self-sustaining fission, or criticality, in an FCM are minuscule, and even if criticality triggered a small explosion, the burst would probably be contained within an arching steel structure, called the New Safe Confinement (NSC), that was erected over the sarcophagus in 2016 to shield it from the elements and create a safe space for cleanup work.
But the NSC was not designed to withstand shelling, and a breach could disturb the FCMs. It could also release some of the hundreds of tons of highly radioactive dust that have accumulated in the sarcophagus over the years as the FCMs gradually disintegrate.
Thousands of other sites in Ukraine have radiological materials. Most are under the watchful eye of Ukraine’s nuclear regulator. “There’s a lot of ongoing effort to secure material,” says Peter Martin, a nuclear physicist at the University of Bristol who collaborates with scientists at Chornobyl.
That means, where possible, moving sources into vaults and repositories. But Vitaly Fedchenko, a nuclear security expert at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, notes that Ukraine, like other parts of the former Soviet Union, has not kept track of all the Soviet nuclear legacy. “There are a lot of radioactive sources that are not on anyone’s radar,” he says. “Even Ukraine’s radar.”
