The Russian military has destroyed a new laboratory at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which, among other things, is working to improve the management of radioactive waste, the Ukrainian state agency in charge of the Chernobyl exclusion zone said, according to the Associated Press.
The Russian military occupied the decommissioned plant at the beginning of the war. The exclusion zone is a contaminated area around the station, where the world’s largest nuclear accident occurred in 1986.
The state agency reported that the laboratory, which was built with the support of the European Commission at a cost of 6 million euros, was opened in 2015.
The laboratory contains “highly active and radionuclide samples now in the hands of an enemy who we hope will harm themselves, not the civilized world,” the agency said in a statement.
Radionuclides are unstable atoms of chemical elements that emit radiation.
In another worrying turn of events, the Ukrainian Nuclear Regulatory Agency announced on Monday that the radiation monitors around the plant had stopped working.