Radioactive isotopes released after explosion in Russia, indicative of nuclear reactor explosion – Reports
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A mysterious explosion at a Russian weapons testing site earlier this month released various radioactive isotopes, creating a cloud of radioactive gases that swept across a nearby town, the country’s state weather agency said Monday, and experts said the mixture removes all doubt about what blew up.
The deadly August 8 blast at the Nyonoksa military weapons testing range released a handful of rapidly decaying radioactive isotopes — strontium-91, barium-139, barium-140, and lanthanum-140 — which have half-lives ranging from 83 minutes to 12.8 days, the Roshydromet national weather and environmental monitoring agency said in a statement.
Joshua Pollack, a leading expert on nuclear and missile proliferation, told Insider: “If anyone still doubts that a nuclear reactor was involved in this incident, this report should go a long way toward resolving that.”
AFP reports that Alexander Uvarov, editor of the independent AtomInfo.ru news site, said the isotopes did not pose a threat to the population. They are products of nuclear fission of uranium, he told RIA Novosti news agency. Russia’s Rosatom nuclear agency has said that its specialists killed in the accident were developing “new weapons” and providing support for a missile with an “isotope power source.”
This collection of radioisotopes could be released by a reaction involving uranium-235.
The Northern Department of Russia’s Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring, Roshydromet, together with its Research Association ‘Typhoon’ on Monday revealed some of the radionuclide composition found after analyzing gases from the cloud sweeping over Severodvinsk in the hours after the fatal accident on August 8th.
According to information posted by Roshydromet, the researchers found a mixture of isotopes of barium, strontium and lanthanum and daughter nuclides. All are short-lived fission products.
Norwegian nuclear safety expert Nils Bøhmer says the information removes any doubts.
“The presence of decay products like barium and strontium is coming from a nuclear chain reaction. It is a proof that is was a nuclear reactor that exploded,” Bøhmer says.
The Russian government and Rosatom have been vague about what happened. A Rosatom statement on 10 August after the blast said only that the device was an “isotopic power source in a liquid-fuel engine”, suggesting the incident was some kind of failed missile test.
A second Rosatom statement, issued by the head of the research institute where the five specialists worked, suggested the test involved either a small nuclear reactor or a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) – both of which have applications on spacecraft.
But the four radionuclides identified by Roshydromet on Monday are extremely unusual, according to Andrei Zolotkov, a chemist who spent 35 years working on Russia’s nuclear icebreaker fleet and knows the details of typical nuclear reactors.
The identified radionuclides are of a type that could be produced in a uranium-235 reaction commonly used in nuclear reactors. But even then, strontium-91 is exotic, he says. And other radionuclides, such as caesium-137, should have also been detected.
Russia has been cagey with the details of the accident, which killed at least five and as many as seven people and triggered a radiation spike in nearby Severodvinsk, a detail Russia has flip-flopped on acknowledging.
