Radioactive material stolen from Chernobyl monitoring lab: Here's what that means.
Sometime during Russia's invasion of Chernobyl in Ukraine, looters stole radioactive material from a radiation monitoring laboratory near the defunct nuclear power plant. There seems to be a low risk that this material would be used in so-called dirty bombs, an expert told Live Science.
The looters took pieces of radioactive waste, which could theoretically be used to create a dirty bomb, a device that combines radioactive material with a conventional explosive, Anatolii Nosovskyi, director of the Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP) in Kyiv, told Science. They also swiped radioactive isotopes — radioactive chemical elements with different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei — that are usually used to calibrate instruments in the monitoring lab, Nosovskyi said.
On March 25, Science reported that the radioactive material had been stolen. New Scientist later confirmed these reports with an ISPNPP scientist, who spoke with reporters on the condition of anonymity. The source said that the earlier Science report was "accurate based on the information available."
The stolen material can't be used to make nuclear weapons, as it doesn't contain any plutonium or uranium, Bruno Merk, a research chair in computational modeling for nuclear engineering at the University of Liverpool, told New Scientist.
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