LONDON: Radioactive material on the loose in many countries could be used to build a “dirty bomb” that can spread terror and disease, says a new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

“The “dirty bomb” using radioactive material is not a nuclear bomb,” IAEA Director Mark Gwozdecky said at the launch of the report in London on Tuesday. Casualties would be caused by the conventional blast that would go with such a device. But such an explosion can “spread terror and contamination,” he said.

There has been at least one attempt to use a “dirty bomb,” Gwozdecky said. Chechen rebels placed a container with caesium-137 in a park in Moscow in 1996. But fortunately the material was not dispersed.

The IAEA note says dirty bombs are usually constructed from conventional explosives and radioactive material, the detonation of which would result in the dispersion of the radioactive material contained in the bomb.

The IAEA, the Vienna-based wing of the UN that monitors the use of nuclear and radioactive material, has launched new moves with governments to counter threats from this source. “It is a real concern, a real threat,” he said. “It would be irresponsible not to take immediate action.”

The radioactive materials needed to build a dirty bomb can be found in almost any country in the world, and more than 100 countries may have inadequate control and monitoring programmes necessary to prevent, or even detect, the theft of these materials, the IAEA report says.

The IAEA points out that while radioactive sources number in the millions, only a small percentage have enough strength to cause serious radiological harm. “It is these powerful sources that need to be focused on as a priority,” it says in its report.

The IAEA has identified radioactive sources used in industrial radiography, radiotherapy, industrial irradiators and thermo-electric generators as those that are the most significant from a safety and security standpoint, because they contain large amounts of radioactive material such as cobalt-60, strontium-90, caesium-137, and iridium-192.

“What is needed is a cradle-to-grave control of powerful radioactive sources to protect them against terrorism or theft,” says IAEA Director- General Mohamed ElBaradei. “One of our priorities is to assist states in creating and strengthening national regulatory infrastructures to ensure that these radioactive sources are appropriately regulated and adequately secured at all times.”

The IAEA has launched a drive against “orphaned” radioactive sources — a term utilized by nuclear regulators to denote radioactive sources that are outside official regulatory control. Such sources are a widespread phenomenon in the former Soviet Union, the IAEA report says.

The report points out that even the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports that US companies have lost track of nearly 1,500 radioactive sources within the country since 1996, and more than half were never recovered. A EU study estimated that every year up to about 70 sources are lost from regulatory control in the EU.

The IAEA, working in collaboration with the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the Ministry for Atomic Energy in Russia, have established a tripartite working group on “Securing and Managing Radioactive Sources.”

Officials representing the three sides agreed at a meeting on June 12 to develop “a coordinated and proactive strategy to locate, recover, secure and recycle orphan sources throughout the former Soviet Union.”

Worldwide, the IAEA has tabulated more than 20,000 operators of significant radioactive sources: more than 10,000 radiotherapy units for medical care are in use; about 12,000 industrial sources for radiography are supplied annually, and about 300 irradiator facilities containing radioactive sources for industrial applications are in operation. In many countries, as the regulatory control of radioactive sources is weak, the inventories are not well known, the IAEA report says.

The report says more than 100 countries may have no minimum infrastructure in place to properly control radiation sources. The IAEA is also concerned about more than 50 countries that are not IAEA member states. These are likely to have no regulatory infrastructure, the IAEA report says. The IAEA has been active in lending its expertise to search out and secure orphaned sources in several countries. “In Kabul, in late March, the IAEA was called in to secure a powerful cobalt source abandoned in a former hospital,” the report says. “In Uganda a week later, the IAEA helped the government to secure a source that appeared to have been stolen for illicit resale.”

The IAEA database includes 263 confirmed incidents since January 1993 that involved radioactive material other than nuclear material. “In most of these cases, the radioactive material was in the form of sealed radioactive sources, but some incidents with unsealed radioactive samples or radioactively contaminated materials such as contaminated scrap metal also have been reported to the illicit trafficking database and are included in the statistics,” the report says. “Some States are more complete than others in reporting incidents, and open-source information suggests that the actual number of cases is significantly larger than the number confirmed to the IAEA.”

Such material could be lethal in the hands of a suicide bomber, the IAEA report says. “The danger of handling powerful radioactive sources can no longer be seen as an effective deterrent, which dramatically changes previous assumptions,” says ElBaradei.

The risk of accidents is the other major concern, besides terrorism, that can derive from sources that are “orphaned”, the IAEA report says. Orphaned sources include sources that were never subject to regulatory control, sources that were subject to regulatory control but since have been abandoned, lost or misplaced, and sources that were stolen or removed without proper authorization. Exactly how many orphaned sources there are in the world is not known, but the numbers are thought to be in the thousands, the IAEA report says.

The IAEA has set up voluntary standards to cut down risks from such sources, Gwozdecky said. “But we need individual states to implement them.”—Dawn/The InterPress News Services.