Before Russia's invasion, the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology was a jewel in the crown of Ukraine's highly developed nuclear research sector. Now, staff at the U.S.-funded atomic research lab in northeastern Ukraine spend their days patching up the facility, which has been badly damaged by repeated Russian strikes.
Emergency workers remove an unexploded Russian air bomb in Preobrazhenka, Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, on April 4, 2023. There is activity at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, but it's not what scientists at its cutting-edge nuclear laboratory trained for.
Mykola Shulga, general director of the institute's National Science Center, said the damage is "significant -- but we are doing repairs on our own." Ukraine's nuclear inspectorate said shelling last year damaged the facility's heating, cooling and ventilation systems. An electrical substation and diesel generators were destroyed, leaving the site without electricity for a time.
In communist times, the Kharkiv facility's research helped develop nuclear weapons, making it a Soviet equivalent of Los Alamos in the United States. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the U.S. agreed to fund Ukrainian nuclear research in exchange for Ukraine getting rid of its stockpiles of nuclear bomb-making material.
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