I told you so. The lab was broken into the first day. It was a target the Russians regarded as important. The question is why? And who? Where are the people that were taking care of the lab in the absense of most of the other scientists? There is no way of knowing exactly who has custody of the contents of the lab or any other aspect of Chernobyl. The world has a real problem.
At one point in history, yellowcake became an issue, although it was proven that all inventories were intact (click here) and never was it in Iraq. This is something different now. This is actual theft.
The Russians evacuated Chernobyl and the city of Chornobyl. They went into Belarus. Where did they go after crossing the border? Who did they take the nuclear supplies to and are the two scientists from the lab in Belarus? All these facts need to be presented to the IAEA and the international nuclear regulatory reporting agencies. Is Victor Orban now in possession of all these elements of the theft?
When the lights went out at Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant on 9 March, (click here) 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 “dirty bomb” 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.”
The drama at Chornobyl began on 24 February, the very first day of the invasion. At 5 a.m., as Russian troops poured across Ukraine’s border with Belarus—just 15 kilometers from Chornobyl—ISPNPP managers were ordered to evacuate most staff, who monitor the safety of the plant, provide technical support for decommissioning, and develop protocols for managing radioactive waste in the off-limits “exclusion zone” surrounding Chornobyl. Within 2 hours, 67 had cleared out; two who live in Chornobyl village stayed behind to keep an eye on the institute’s lab. “We’ve lost contact with these brave people,” says ISPNPP senior scientist Maxim Saveliev....
