Yet all their initial efforts to find the uranium fuel inside the reactor hall itself had failed. The members of the Kurchatov task force measured radiation exposure of thousands of roentgen an hour on all available routes through the debris toward the reactor vessel—from below, above, and both sides; they searched for molten lead and the melted residue of the sand, the boron carbide, or the dolomite thrown from the helicopters. But they found no evidence of any of it, and certainly no sign of the fuel.
