Radioactive Material Disappears En Route To Michigan
Radioactive material headed to Michigan from an Ohio company never made it to its destination, a filing by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission revealed. In its "Current Event Notification" report for Wednesday, the commission that regulates commercial nuclear power plants and other civilian uses of nuclear materials in the United States said the Ohio Bureau of Radiation Protection had informed officials about a missing shipment involving Prime NDT Services.
The Ohio radiation bureau learned from Prime NDT that a source of Iridium-192 was shipped through an unnamed carrier on July 12 from a facility in Strasburg, Ohio, to a facility in Michigan, the NRC said. Iridium-192 is a radioactive isotope of iridium, which can be used in industrial gauges that inspect welding seams in such equipment as pipelines and in medicine to treat certain cancers, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The material can also be used to make a dirty bomb…
The material, while having medical and industrial uses, may also be used in what is known as "dirty bombs."
According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit organization that works to prevent attacks and accidents involving nuclear material,"a radioactive 'dirty bomb' or radiological dispersal device made by combining radioactive material with conventional explosives to spread it … could cause significant short- and long-term health problems for those in the area and could leave billions of dollars in damagedue to the costs of evacuation, relocation and cleanup."
Radioactive materials used in those devices, the NTI says, "are dispersed across thousands of commercial, industrial, medical and research sites … and many of them are poorly secured, particularly during transport when they are vulnerable to theft. In fact, the same isotopes used for life-saving blood transfusions and cancer treatments in hospitals around the world— such as cesium-137, cobalt-60 and iridium-192— could be used to build a bomb."
The event notification report for the material intended to be shipped to Michigan stated that multiple agencies were alerted, including the Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Emergency Management Agency. Also, the notice said, "the state of Tennessee has been informed."
full article: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/radioactive-material-disappears-en-route-michigan