Exit Signs, Prostate Radiotherapy Implants and Chernobyl Mushrooms
By: Georgia Skandali
Tags: Nuclear, Radiation, Safety

By Georgia Skandali, Sabrin Falhi and Siri Christiansen

While the world is entering its 75th year in the atomic age, many people are still feeling looming anxiety when it comes to radioactivity and nuclear power. According to Sam Meyer, a researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) “People are afraid of radiation, for a good reason as it is a scary thing. It is kind of like this invisible killer but it is also poorly understood and makes people terrified.”

This fear becomes even bigger when there is a lack of transparency for the public and the absence of complete data on nuclear and radioactive issues. But what exactly are these radioactive issues and what does it mean when there is lost regulatory control over radioactive items?

First of all, the term nuclear material is any special fissile material or source that can be used in nuclear explosive devices — particularly plutonium and highly enriched uranium. Radioactive material is commonly used in several sectors and humans are exposed to radioactivity each and every day in very small quantities.

This means that nuclear material can be found not only in a nuclear power plant as one might think, but in several sectors. In fact, radioactive material is commonly used in the industrial and medical fields.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) there is a 1–5 categorization system, that is based primarily on the potential cause of health effects, ranging from the most dangerous and most alarming sources (category 1) to the least ones that pose no harm to humans (category 5).

For example, the EXIT signs and fire alarms that you pass by daily belong in category 5 and possess low radioactive properties. However, according to Sam Mayer “It is a theory that one could create something dangerous, a radioactive exposure device of some sort if one were to accumulate hundreds of exit signs”. Fortunately, nobody has yet used explosives to spread radioactive materials, but the possibility can be greatly reduced through government and civil society action. That said, the problem isn’t necessarily the fire alarms, exit signs or the radiotherapy implants, but the fact these materials are often not disposed of safely.

This is the reason why the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies pioneered a new method using new media tools such as social media searches and social network analysis to complement under-resourced governments in their efforts to identify and locate radioactive sources. This included building and analyzing a database of current and former employees at operational and defunct facilities, identified through network analysis.

Sam Meyer speculates that the idea behind the initiative is rooted back to 2013 when a few high-profile incidents were taking place. One being the territorial expansion by ISIS, where the militant group allegedly harbored dangerous radioactive sources on the conquered territory. And another incident happened in Mexico where very dangerous radioactive material had gone missing from a truck and if not returned, it could have had detrimental aftermath for both the environment and humans. “We wanted to know approximately what is out there” hears the researcher’s words as he describes the very foundation for the database.

As radioactive sources could cause major damage to people and the environment, it is important to trace the missing material as well as the incidents of different nature. The CNS database has a categorization for theft and is keen on tracking down cases where radioactive materials are trafficked on a transnational basis and used by criminal gangs, individuals and even state factors. For instance, in 1990 the Chechen militant group was reported leaving a highly dangerous radioactive source in a park in Moscow whilst a Chinese man was caught trying to smuggle radioactive material within cigarettes across the Chinese border. The incidents clearly range but having them on the database could one day work on behalf of national security and help to trace down perpetrators.

Yet, not all these incidents reflect deliberate attempts to steal radioactive sources. According to the findings of the CNS Incidents and Trafficking Database, human failure such as loss, delivery failure, and improper disposal account for most incidents. In 2019, theft was the cause of 50 incidents, whereas loss, delivery failure, and improper disposal caused 93 incident put together, a pattern consistent with previous years.

On the one hand, the great majority of detected trafficking incidents appear to involve opportunists, motivated by the hope of profit on reselling an expensive instrument or as scrap metal. On the other hand, incidents and accidents may happen as in other industries, often due to a lack of awareness.

In many cases the staff don’t think of them as particularly — it is just another piece of an equipment, these industrial radiographic cameras that are used for logging and oil drilling and mining operations — these are things that are taken from the warehouse and driven over bumpy dirt roads, 100km out to the wilderness to see if the tree is good for logging or the soil is good for drilling or something like that, and you know, things happen”. In most cases the radioactive materials have dropped off from transporting vehicles and left in cars overnight, creating an opportunity for theft: “It could be as simple as you forget to close the hatch of the pick-up truck or forget to tie something down and you know you drive there and it falls out.”

The fact that most recorded incidents of lost radioactive material come from the industrial sector may challenge common assumptions about nuclear security. Most often, public debate regarding security measures focuses on nuclear power plants, perhaps forgetting the importance of a strong security culture in other sectors that uses radioactive materials. As Sam remarks, “it’s likely that nuclear power plants and reactors (research reactors) and so forth have an ever-present security control, although that fails sometimes too to occasionally near-disastrous results, whereas these other companies whose chief identity is not associated with things nuclear or things radioactive — they merely used the equipment, they have other focuses and so yes — there’s more of them and they are probably on the whole less aware of the security implications of the equipment.”

Despite the efforts of the CNS, it’s not easy to identify where items are lost and all the more difficult to know where they end up. According to Sam Meyer, the vast majority of lost or orphaned material outside of regular control is unknown. Furthermore, the vast amount that is known is not reported and the vast amount that is reported is not reported publicly.

As criminal and unauthorized acts involving radioactive materials have emerged as an international concern, a range of international legal instruments have been adopted over the past decades to deal with issues of radiation protection, nuclear non-proliferation safety, and security. These instruments can have a legal effect between States and international organizations and they establish rights and obligations.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Incident and Trafficking Database, which works with governments around the world to track such incidents is generated exclusively from voluntary member state reporting, and whose full data is only available to the participating states’ governments and certain international organizations.

In comparison, the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) is the only database of its type that is generated from publicly available data and news reports, and which is freely available to anyone.

It is important to mention that no international instrument binds countries to report the loss of radioactive material to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In other words, the responsibility for nuclear security rests entirely with each member state. As a result, very few countries routinely and systematically report all incidents involving the loss of radioactive material to the public. Only the United States, Canada, France, Japan, South Korea and Belgium have routine reporting mechanisms.

It is evident that countries around the world may lose regulatory control over radioactive material. The IAEA’s Incident and Tracking Database (ITDB) remains confidential, and thus closed to outside researchers. However, it suffers from similar reporting inconsistencies.

This is the reason why Sam Mayers explains that their first and most important policy recommendation is to develop a common standard that will encourage wider reporting transparency.

“It will not only increase accountability and public awareness, but I think the hidden benefit is that when an incident does happen, and is reported in the press there’s more of an infrastructure for releasing that information to the public rather than that being up to the reporter or the media company who are not specialists in nuclear science or radiology.”

This means that even though an official incident reporting can serve as reliable information, in countries where such information is not disclosed people have to rely on sensationalizing media articles that in most cases could be inaccurate.

For instance, there have been many cases that were reported by media which ended up being fake stories or hoaxes, either falsely claiming the presence of radionuclides that do not exist or misrepresenting the nature or quantity of trafficked material. One example of this kind of reporting was in 2019 when a story was published about a bus in Vienna that illegally transported 20kg of highly enriched Uranium, probably the most dangerous material in the world. However, after some investigation, Sam and his researchers' team found out that this story was fake because the materials that were found were simply lead and sand. “When reported, these cases require careful investigation to determine their accuracy, which may divert resources away from actual case investigations,” Sam tells us.

An increase in global transparency by state actors regarding radioactive incidents could be of great help in combatting media inaccuracy surrounding such highly misrepresented topics as radioactivity and nuclear affairs.