SPAIN: Radioactivity Alarm in Five Countries

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Jun 20 1998 (IPS) - A radioactivity alarm in Spain and four other European countries has sparked deamnds for an overhaul of controls on nuclear materials in pricvate companies and state enterprises.

Officially, news of the escape of radioactive material from the Acerinox metal company was revealed to the Nuclear Security Council (CSN) on June 9 and was made public on June 11. The Andalucian environmentalist organization Agaden, however, said that the accident actually occurred on May 25 – a date the company has neither confirmed nor denied.

The minister of the Environment, Isabel Tocino said that she learned of the case on June 11 through a press release issued by the CSN.

The president of the CSN, Juan Manuel Kindelan, this week denied that there had been any spread of disinformation but critics of the affair remained hostile.

The Italian minister of Environment, Edo Ronchi, criticized the Spanish government last Monday for not having informed of the accident in a timely manner. For the same reason, the judge of the Italian city of Turin decided to open a judicial investigation.

While the escape occurred in Spain, the detection of an increase in radioactivity in France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany activated the alarm systems in those countries.

Kindelan maintained, in what he himself called a “simple explanation,” that the winds could have carried the contaminated smoke over the Mediterranean Sea to these countries, leaving only very small and lateral indications in the Spanish province of Almeria, which has a coast along this sea.

But he had no explanatipon of how the clouds passed without detection over the Baleares Islands, which are also located in the Mediterranean Sea, on the way between Almeria, Italy and France.

Environmentalists are concerned that the radioactivity was detected only accidentally. The Acerinox factory, which processes metallurgic scrap metal to extract steel for reprocessing, has two doors only one of which has radioactivity sensors.

On May 25, a truck belonging to the company left the factory through the second door. The driver stopped at a restaurant to eat lunch and then returned through the front door, where the alarm went off.

Acerinox uses scrap metal from the Netherlands, the United States, Canada and Germany. According to the minister of the Environment in Andalucia, Jose Luis Blanco, it was not known from where the contaminated particles originated.

The CSN said Wednesday that radioactivity has been detected in only five of the 129 workers of Acerinox who have had medical examinations, at a level of five microsieverts, similar to that which remains in the body after an X-ray.

The environmentalist organization Aedenat, based in Madrid, considers this one of the three most serious incidents in Spanish nuclear history.

According to the group, the most likely hypothesis is that cesium 137, a highly volatile radioactive element with a 30-year life span, arrived with the scrap metal.

Aedenat is studying the possibility of initiating a criminal suit against the company, the CSN and the provider of cesium 137, if the origin of the compound can be located.

On Wednesday, it was also reported that two companies, one in Andalucia and another in Extremadura, an autonomous community near the Portuguese border, paralyzed their activities while inspections are carried out, since they received steel powder from Acerinox.

The French daily Le Figaro said that “this small cloud of cesium announces a tempest: the poorly managed proliferation of small nuclear doses.”