- Jeff,
Here is confirmation of the report I gave on your program a month ago regarding
the planned search for abandoned RTG reactors in the Soviet Georgia countryside.
Aerial surveys are now being performed to find radioactive materials, especially
like the two deadly Strontium-90 Radioisotope Thermal Generators found
by three lumberjacks in December of last year. All three suffered from
radiation sickness and one is fighting for his life. The lumberjacks found
the deadly material with help from the melted snow in a circle around
the thermal reactors. It reminds me of another Soviet event in May 2001,
where scavengers removed the lead shielding from a nuclear powered lighthouse
to sell the lead for scrap. Two of the four men severely burned their
eyes and hands from the strontium-90 inside the reactor.
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- By Louis Charbonneau
- 7-3-2
-
- VIENNA (Reuters) - Georgian authorities will expand a
search for nuclear material left over from Soviet days to rough terrain
near Georgia's breakaway Abkhazia region, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog
said on Tuesday.
-
- The discovery last December of two containers of radioactive
material in Abkhazia deepened fears in the wake of the September 11 attacks
that nuclear material could fall into the hands of people who would use
it to make crude weapons.
-
- The nuclear material found in Abkhazia was used in Soviet
times to power remote communications stations and it is suspected that
two more such containers remain undiscovered.
-
- Last week, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) warned that over 100 countries had inadequate safeguards
to prevent the theft of radioactive materials that could be used in dirty
bombs, devices using standard explosives to spread nuclear material.
-
- IAEA experts have been helping local authorities since
June 10 in an unsuccessful attempt to locate the containers. But the agency
said local experts would handle the search near Abkhazia.
-
- The IAEA said it believed Georgian experts would be capable
of handling the situation if it found the containers, believed to contain
highly-radioactive strontium-90, useless in a conventional nuclear bomb
but which could be used in a dirty bomb.
-
- "The Georgians now have a nice cadre of local personnel
who have been trained in search and recovery, and they have some very
sophisticated detection equipment," IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky
said.
-
- The Georgian experts will use a U.N. helicopter to search
the border with the former Soviet republic's secessionist Abkhazia region
in the company of Russian peacekeeping troops.
-
- Abkhazia has remained outside the Georgian government's
control since it declared independence a decade ago and guerrillas regularly
clash with the Abkhaz military.
-
- "Currently (U.N. military observers) are in negotiations
with the Abkhaz side and Russian peacekeepers for Georgian experts to
be allowed to check the area," Soso Kakushadze of Georgia's environment
ministry told Reuters.
-
- He said the operation would begin in a few days and would
take several days to complete.
-
- Gwozdecky said IAEA experts would return to Georgia in
September to resume a country-wide search for various types of nuclear
material believed to have fallen out of regulatory control since the collapse
of the Soviet Union.
-
- Three Georgian foresters who found the first two containers
in December suffered severe radiation sickness
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