KHARKIV, Ukraine (AP) — There’s activity at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, but that’s not what scientists were trained for at its nuclear laboratory.
Staff at the U. S. -funded atomic laboratory in northeastern Ukraine spend their days repairing the facility, which has been badly damaged due to repeated Russian attacks.
More than a year after the first missile fired, the wind ruined the windows and exposed the insulating shutters. (2. 5 meters) deep. According to staff, the site was hit a hundred times by rockets and bombs in the first months of the war, and attacks remain a constant threat. Kharkiv, near the front line of the war and the border with Russia, is bombed almost daily from Russia’s neighboring Belgorod region.
Before the Russian invasion, the institute was the crown jewel of Ukraine’s highly evolved nuclear studies sector. Its experimental reactor had opened just six months earlier, designed to provide education and study services and to manufacture medical isotopes used in cancer treatment.
While those who fear a nuclear fate twist have turned their attention to Ukraine’s massive Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is under Russian control, the small reactor at Kharkiv’s lab also poses a risk, so far there have been no leaks.
Mykola Shulga, director general of the institute’s National Science Center, said it’s “significant, but we’re repairing ourselves. “
“The movements in this facility were intentional,” Shulga said, standing in front of an elegant gray construction whose panels were toppled or riddled with shrapnel. “This wall here hit seven missiles. “
The International Atomic Energy Agency also accused Russia of “sustained attack” on the think tank. A delegation from the firm in November found that almost all of the buildings in it were damaged, and “many of them probably could not be repaired. “IAEA leader Rafael Mariano Grossi called the extent of the pain “shocking” and worse than expected.
The only positive note, IAEA inspectors said, is that there was no release of radiation from the laboratory’s small experimental reactor.
Ukraine’s nuclear inspectorate said last year’s bombing damaged the facility’s heating, cooling and ventilation systems. An electrical substation and diesel turbines were destroyed, leaving the facility without power for some time.
Ukraine’s prosecutor and security service have opened fraud charges for alleged war crimes and “ecocide,” one of several cases accusing Russia of environmental destruction.
“Take a look,” said Galyna Tolstolutska, head of the radiation damage and radioactive tissue science branch.
“Look, look. That was the panel. It’s certainly no longer useful,” he said, searching for a device destroyed when the roof was shattered by a bomb. “This total position was exposed to rain, snow, anything. “
During the communist era, studies at the Kharkiv facility helped expand nuclear weapons, making it a soviet of Los Alamos in the United States. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the United States agreed to fund Ukraine’s nuclear studies in exchange for Ukraine cutting off its stockpiles of nuclear bomb-making material.
The U. S. government The U. S. Department of Defense says the Kharkiv nuclear facility, built in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, is the first of its kind in the world, “designed to produce medical isotopes, train nuclear professionals, Ukraine’s nuclear industry, and supply experimental capabilities. “to conduct studies on reactor physics, tissues and fundamental science. It was commissioned in August 2021.
Mark Hibbs, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s nuclear policy program, said the lab is “a unique facility” whose war damage is a loss to global science.
“It was about to be used as a study tool, and then came the war,” he said.
Russia’s invasion woke Europe up from a nuclear war and a nuclear accident. Fighting has broken out intermittently around Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, triggering a catastrophic radiation leak like the Chernobyl crisis in northern Ukraine, where a reactor exploded in 1986, sending radiation over a wide area.
Kharkiv does not provide the same point of risk. The Kharkiv reactor was placed in a “deep subcritical state”, necessarily sent into hibernation, on the first day of the war, and contains far less nuclear fuel than a power plant anyway. Paddy Regan, professor of nuclear physics at the University of Surrey, said the study reactors are a hundred times smaller than civilian nuclear reactors.
“These accelerator-driven systems have nothing to do with civilian nuclear reactors,” Regan said. “These are futuristic design ideas” aimed at creating “an intrinsic reactor system” without the threat of meltdown from existing power reactors.
“There’s a lot more to bombs than any radioactive material,” Regan said.
However, Ukraine’s State Inspectorate for Nuclear Regulation warned of possible “serious radiological consequences and contamination of surrounding territories” if the reactor is damaged. Institute staff say the radiation can extend 10 kilometers, covering a domain house for 640,000 people.
Depending on weather conditions, pollutants may also succeed in Belgorod on the other side of the Russian border, said the center’s deputy director, Ivan Karnaukhov.
“They can blow everything up, but it will also be their Belgorod region, radioactivity,” he said. “It may not be Chernobyl, but there will be significant contamination. “
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