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Inside a laboratory in Kharkiv, Ukraine, sits an experimental device innocuously named the Neutron Source, containing several dozen pounds of enriched uranium — enough, if it were scattered, to contaminate much of the city.
The lab building lies just 14 miles from the front line of Europe’s largest war in eight decades, and Ukrainian authorities say the structure has been damaged by Russian munitions 74 times.
“It’s scary but we are used to it,” said Oleksandr Bykhun, a deputy chief engineer at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, Ukraine’s premier nuclear research center, which houses the Neutron Source.
Much of the atomic fear stoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has focused on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, held by Russian forces since early in the war. But Ukraine has a long list of vulnerable nuclear facilities, like reactors for research or power generation — including Chernobyl, where the world’s worst nuclear accident occurred — and storage sites for spent fuel.
The longer the war drags on, the greater the risk of a strike that could spread radioactive material across a wide area. Some of the sites have extensive security measures, but they were not built to take a direct hit from a large bomb.
“It’s a situation which is very dangerous, and we are lucky that no nuclear accident occurred yet,” said Bruno Chareyron, scientific adviser to the Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity, a French nonprofit group.
