(Newswire.net — September 8, 2014) — Mexican authorities said they found the stolen truck and recovered likely all of the radioactive cobalt in a remote area about 25 miles away from where it was taken. The suspected thieves are still on the loose, though authorities expect they could turn up at a clinic suffering symptoms of radiation exposure.
The missing material in Iraq likely poses little threat, according to US officials, but experts say IS’s territory may become a hotspot for stealing radioactive materials.
Last week, authorities in Kazakhstan announced that a container holding caesium-137 (a radioactive material) disappeared, possibly after falling off a truck.
The Kazakh government says they are actively searching for the container, which weighs over 100 pounds, but would not or could not say where it came from, or where it might be headed.
It’s unclear how big of a threat the missing caesium-137 poses, but experts say it highlights a growing global problem: As radioactive materials proliferate throughout the world, including in countries that don’t have the resources to secure, track or find them, there’s mounting fear that they could find their way into the hands of criminals and radical groups who could use them to build radioactive weapons, often referred to as “dirty bombs.”
“There’s concern that these sources are widely spread and easily accessible,” said Andrew Bieniawski, the vice president of material security and minimization at the Nuclear Threat Initiative and a former top official in the US National Nuclear Security Administration. “They’re used in everything from oil wells to the medical industry. You have thousands of these sources around the world, and people don’t realize they’re a threat.”
Analysts believe the radioactive material in Kazakhstan fell off the back of a truck transporting it in the western part of the country. Tom Bielefeld, a Germany-based physicist and nuclear security analyst says the caesium-137 likely came from an industrial source, possibly from a tool used in the oil industry to measure well depth. But it could also be related to Kazakhstan’s decommissioned BN-350 nuclear reactor.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported about 140 cases of missing or unauthorized uses of nuclear and radioactive materials in 2013. But it’s likely that the number of cases is higher as many cases go unreported, according to Bruce Bennett, a defense analyst at Rand Corporation.
The vast majority of the radioactive material that goes missing isn’t used in criminal activity, and the criminal use of radioactive material has been trending downward over the last decade, according to the IAEA.