> 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.
I found this article a bit better than Reuters one;
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/radioacti...
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?
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...