The UN nuclear chief said Thursday he is sending inspectors to two locations in Ukraine where Russia alleged that activities related to the possible production of 'dirty bombs' was taking place and expects them to reach a conclusion 'in days — very fast.'
The UN nuclear chief said Thursday he is sending inspectors to two locations in Ukraine where Russia alleged that activities related to the possible production of “dirty bombs” was taking place and expects them to reach a conclusion “in days — very fast.”
The envoy, Vassily Nebenzia, said that information was from Russia’s Ministry of Defence. He said the ministry reported that work on a dirty bomb, which uses explosives to scatter radioactive waste in an effort to sow terror, is “at their concluding stage.” Normally inspectors look for nuclear material such as enriched uranium, plutonium and thorium, he said, but in this case “there is mention of certain isotopes, cesium and strontium. So, we are going to be performing a different kind of work to determine whether the fuel there has been reprocessed in some way to extract this.”
The nuclear issue was heightened by Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu’s unsubstantiated allegation that Ukraine was preparing to launch a dirty bomb in weekend calls to his British, French, Turkish and U.S. counterparts. Britain, France and the United States rejected the claim out of hand, calling it “transparently false.”Ukraine dismissed Moscow’s claim as an attempt to distract attention from the Kremlin’s own alleged plans to detonate a dirty bomb.
Grossi said in the statement that nuclear safety and security at Zaporizhzhia “remains precarious” and engineers have been working “to stabilize the plant’s fragile external power supplies following repeated outages earlier this month that forced it to temporarily rely on its emergency diesel generators for electricity.”