|
Discovery of radioactive scrap calls for proper burial
August 01, 2005During all the road trips I have taken through El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, it never occurred to me that lurking in the dunes along the highway just 50 kilometers south of the U.S.-Mexico border city area lie heaps of uncontained radioactive waste. The secret in the desert sands recently was revealed by Mexican nuclear physicist Bernardo Salas Mar, a former employee of the federal atomic power plant in Veracruz state who was fired after publicly disclosing its radioactive contamination of the Gulf of Mexico. ...snip... The location is on top of the burial grounds of the waste from what Chihuahua journalist Ignacio Alvarado Ãlvarez calls the worst nuclear disaster of this hemisphere, "Our Chernobyl." That is the fiasco that began 21 years ago in 1984 when guards at Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratories near Santa Fe, New Mexico, detected a truckload of rebar from Old Mexico contaminated by radioactive Cobalt-60. In one of the twisted tales typifying the bi-national boundary line's environmental predicament, the contamination originated from a U.S. source sent to Mexico illegally; the resulting product then was shipped for sale in the United States, where it was discovered to be dangerous and returned to Mexico for confinement. The now inactive state-run Aceros de Chihuahua foundry had made the rebar by recycling scrap obtained at the Ciudad Juárez Yonke Fenix. The junkyard is now famous because among the metals it received for resale was a gamma radiation chamber with pellets of Cobalt-60 that the most expensive private hospital in the city had acquired as contraband from a U.S. supplier. U.S. importers of the resulting rebar were located. The rebar in the United States was returned to Mexico for confinement. But many shipments of metal that different foundries made with the contaminated scrap from the Fenix junkyard were delivered in at least half the states in Mexico and never recovered for burial. Perhaps the waste mounds that Salas verified are a miniscule part of what somehow was recovered in Mexico. I'd be concerned about what this could be used for... Posted by: Grenter Flineque9605 2005-08-02 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=125672 |