INTERVIEW - UN worried about nuclear "dirty bomb" material
Date: 09-Sep-02
Country: AUSTRIA
Author: Louis Charbonneau
A year after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) believes world leaders understand that militants could make weapons out of radioactive material left over from everyday uses.
"It's very difficult for nuclear reactors to fall out of regulatory control - to be orphaned - because they're usually owned by governments and are in a few places that everyone knows about," Abel Julio Gonzalez, Director of Radiation and Waste Safety at the IAEA, told Reuters in an interview.
"With radioactive material, the opposite is the case. It is usually owned by private people - hospitals, small clinics, companies that do radiography (X-rays) of piping. It's much easier for this material to be orphaned," he said.
The IAEA's big worry is that it could fall into the hands of terrorist groups who could use them to make "dirty bombs" - not involving any nuclear reaction or great physical damage, but using conventional explosives to spread radioactivity and panic.
POST-SOVIET PROBLEM
Perhaps the main worry is the former Soviet Union.
After it fell apart, much radioactive material that had been used there was simply abandoned. Nuclear fuel rods lie unattended on Arctic beaches, portable generators using radioactive sources sit in forests, dump trucks stand idle full of radioactive powder.
"We are talking here about simple radioactive material that is used for thousands of applications, used for so many things that our life would be completely different without it. This material can easily be orphaned and severely contaminate areas."
Caesium is one of the more worrisome radioactive sources for the agency.
In 1987 a canister of caesium-137 powder, used to keep grain from rotting, was abandoned in a junkyard in Brazil. It contaminated 240 people, four of whom later died.
Gonzalez said an unknown number of trucks with a large amount of caesium appear to have disappeared in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Moldova.
The agency is cooperating with the United States and Russia to try to recover them, though the number of trucks and their location is still unclear.
"They are as secure as they can be in a place like Georgia...or Moldova," he said. "These are the kinds of sources that no one knows about and only appear when somebody gets hurt.
Last December parts from abandoned Soviet-era portable generators containing deadly strontium-90 were found in a remote Georgian forest near the breakaway Abkhazia region. Three woodsmen who discovered them were severely burned by radiation.
Fortunately the events of September 11 have helped to change Russia's attitude towards complying with international controls on radioactive and nuclear materials, Gonzalez said.
"Before, the basic attitude of Russia was non-engagement - that this was not their problem but a problem of the former Soviet Union," he said. "Now I believe things have changed and there really is engagement from Russia."
