Thieves may have stolen radioactive metal from Japan's tsunami-battered Fukushima

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: CBS News

September 21, 2023 / 7:50 AM


Tokyo — Construction workers stole and sold potentially radioactive scrap metal from near the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, the Japanese environment ministry said on Thursday. The materials went missing from a museum being demolished in a special zone around 2.5 miles from the atomic plant in northeast Japan that was knocked out by a tsunami in 2011.

Although people were allowed to return to the area in 2022 after intense decontamination work, radiation levels can still be above normal and the Fukushima plant is surrounded by a no-go zone. Japan's environment ministry was informed of the theft by workers from a joint venture conducting the demolition work in late July and is "exchanging information with police," ministry official Kei Osada told AFP.

Osada said the metal may have been used in the frame of the building, "which means that it's unlikely that these metals were exposed to high levels of radiation when the nuclear accident occurred." If radioactivity levels are high, metals from the area must go to an interim storage facility or be properly disposed of. If low, they can be re-used. The stolen scrap metals had not been measured for radiation levels, Osada said.

The Mainichi Shimbun daily, citing unidentified sources, reported on Tuesday that the workers sold the scrap metal to companies outside the zone for about 900,000 yen ($6,000). It is unclear what volume of metal went missing, where it is now, or if it poses a health risk.

Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japan-metal-theft-radioactive-scrap-fukushima-nuclear-power-plant/

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Full headline: Thieves may have stolen radioactive metal from Japan's tsunami-battered Fukushima nuclear power plant



There are crazies in Japan too as people might recall the horrid sarin subway attacks almost 30 years ago.

[ImNotGod]

1. A long history of this happening all over the world. Mostly medical equipment improperly disposed of

Ends up in somebodies shed irradiating a whole neighborhood. Even instances of people putting interesting looking metal balls from said equipment in their pockets not knowing they are ionized. Never ends well. There was an incident in Central America where a reactor was dismantled after an accident and the highly contaminated metal ended up being recycled & used in new construction. They only found out when a truck load of new metal beams set off a detector as it was going to a construction site.

[Martin68]

2. Those thieves will die of cancer.

[SouthernDem4ever]

3. That was my first thought

[dembotoz]

4. does your new car glow in the dark?

when i take aluminum cans in to be recycled i never see a Geiger counter

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

5. This crime comes with its own punishment.

I'm guessing the thieves don't know how to handle radioactive material safely.

[womanofthehills]

6. Many Navajos in the four corners are living in contaminated houses

Their houses were built with soil contaminated with uranium from uranium mining and many wells are also contaminated.