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Slashdot: Dirty Bomb Ingredients Go Missing From Chornobyl Monitoring Lab

Dirty Bomb Ingredients Go Missing From Chornobyl Monitoring Lab
Published on March 29, 2022 at 01:06AM
Insecure radioactive materials are the latest worry as Russia continues occupation of infamous nuclear reservation. schwit1 shares a report: When the lights went out at Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant on 9 March, the Russian soldiers holding Ukrainian workers at gunpoint became the least of Anatolii Nosovskyi's worries. More urgent was the possibility of a radiation accident at the decommissioned plant. If the plant's emergency generators ran out of fuel, the ventilators that keep explosive hydrogen gas from building up inside a spent nuclear fuel repository would quit working, says Nosovskyi, director of the Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP) in Kyiv. So would sensors and automated systems to suppress radioactive dust inside a concrete "sarcophagus" that holds the unsettled remains of Chornobyl's Unit Four reactor, which melted down in the infamous 1986 accident. Although power was restored to Chornobyl on 14 March, Nosovskyi's worries have multiplied. In the chaos of the Russian advance, he told Science, looters raided a radiation monitoring lab in Chornobyl village -- apparently making off with radioactive isotopes used to calibrate instruments and pieces of radioactive waste that could be mixed with conventional explosives to form a âoedirty bombâ that would spread contamination over a wide area. ISPNPP has a separate lab in Chornobyl with even more dangerous materials: "powerful sources of gamma and neutron radiation" used to test devices, Nosovskyi says, as well as intensely radioactive samples of material leftover from the Unit Four meltdown. Nosovskyi has lost contact with the lab, he says, so "the fate of these sources is unknown to us."

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