Indonesia says 22 plants in industrial zone contaminated by caesium 137

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/indonesia-says-22-plants-industrial-zone-near-jakarta-contaminated-by-caesium-2025-10-08/

by geox • 9 months ago

125 32 9 months ago

reuters.com

trebligdivad• 9 months ago

I found this article a bit better than Reuters one;

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/radioacti...

idiotsecant• 9 months ago

Weird. Cesium 137 is only produced in spend nuclear fuel as far as I know. Was someone trying to get rid of nuke waste contaminated scrap metal? Soviet maybe?

hinkley6• 9 months ago

We will likely never know. Once you melt the evidence and stir it with tons of other molten metal there’s not much to track.

m4rtink• 9 months ago

IIRC all sources are tracked at manufacture and it migh also be possible to try to match the isotope ration to the original source material ? Not to mention the whole "spraying deadly radiation all over the place" that can be detected with modern sensitive detectors, possibly tracing back all places where the original source was miss-handled.

Sanzig2• 9 months ago

Cs-137 is commonly extracted from fuel used as a source for radiation therapy, although less so these days, due in part to incidents with misplaced sources.

The poster child for Cs-137 incidents is the Goiânia accident where four people died when a Cs-137 capsule was stolen from an abandoned hospital and sold to a scrapyard. Four people died of radiation poisoning, including a six year old.

My guess is this probably has a similar root cause, someone didn't dispose of a medical Cs-137 source properly and it ended up in the scrap metal stream.

grues-dinner• 9 months ago

It's also used as a gamma source for metallurgical testing. Which is what the sources that caused the recent Thai and Russian incidents were used for.

huedaya• 9 months ago

Based on latest update, it came from nearby iron smelter that caried through ashes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53WeiGvAOD4

hinkley6• 9 months ago

Officials from Indonesia’s nuclear energy regulatory agency have traced the source of contamination to a steel manufacturer in the Cikande industrial area known as Peter Metal Technology, or PMT. Some of the highest levels of contamination detected in the area were reportedly found in the company’s furnace, which is about 1.5 miles southwest of the BMS Foods facility where the shrimp was processed.
It’s unclear how it may have become contaminated with cesium-137. Biegalski, whose area of expertise includes nuclear forensics, told CR that the “easiest explanation” is that a medical or industrial device containing cesium-137 was inadvertently reprocessed as scrap metal. The radioactive material could have become gaseous after entering the PMT furnace and then been released from the facility’s smokestack, he said.

arresin2• 9 months ago

Imagine the lead contamination also

hinkley6• 9 months ago

I saw a How it’s Made-esque show on aluminum recycling just a couple years ago, which is when I learned that aluminum-lead alloys are a thing, and have to be separated. They used a pneumatic blast picker, an x ray machine, and real time image processing to separate the lead from the other alloys. I’ve seen other such systems before, and in those the camera was usually around 30ms up the conveyor from the picker and it pushes the targeted materials into a separate hopper. The scan is parallelized to keep it real time.

lima2• 9 months ago

"Released from the facility’s smokestack" sounds bad.

Is it even possible to clean this up, if true?

hedgehog• 9 months ago

Depending on where it went, maybe. Scrape and remove topsoil and everything on top of it downwind where the particles settle. Dredge any waterways. Etc.

Edit: You can read about one such cleanup after the incident linked here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_contamination_from...

Sanzig2• 9 months ago

My guess is it'll eventually be traced back to improperly disposed of Cs-137 source. This wouldn't be the first time [1] [2].

There was also a famous case in the 80s where a scrapyard in Mexico sent some steel contaminated with Cobalt-60 to a foundry where it was melted down into rebar. It was detected when a truck transporting rebar to a construction site took a wrong turn and ended up at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where it triggered contamination alarms. By that point, the rebar had been used in a whole bunch of construction that had to get torn down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acerinox_accident

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez_cobalt-60_c...

SeanAnderson• 9 months ago

Wow, what a lucky fluke to have caught it. Makes me wonder how much construction material has contaminated materials in it that go undetected.

moltar• 9 months ago

So much that in post Soviet countries it’s common to bring a Geiger counter to buy real estate. Usually the contamination is from natural sources like stone quarry that hasn’t been properly inspected.

mkfs• 9 months ago

You should know that Mexican steel was circumspect for years after this, with shipments regularly being checked at the border for contamination.

orbital-decay• 9 months ago

No need to go that far back, Wikipedia lists seven incidents just in 2020s. It happens pretty often, although sources are usually not that powerful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incident...

duskwuff• 9 months ago

There's another incident, not appearing on that list, which seems like a plausible candidate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prachin_Buri_radiation_inciden...

N19PEDL2• 9 months ago

Another similar case occurred in Ukraine in the 80s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...

ipnon• 9 months ago

There is something so horrifying about basic nuclear physics.

mitchbob• 9 months ago

For intensely radioactive materials used in medical equipment and elsewhere, can we require the equivalent of a bottle deposit, where buyers pay a large sum up front when their device is installed and then, when the device reaches the end of its life, the manufacturer or government pays them to get it back and properly disposes of it? I'm guessing that nearly all instances of this sort of thing happening are because of attempts to dodge the - likely large - cost of proper disposal. Make it profitable to do the right thing and organizations will.

s1artibartfast• 9 months ago

No, I don't think that is possible. It would make each of these things prohibitively expensive and be equivalent to a ban.

Indonesia says 22 plants in industrial zone contaminated by caesium 137

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