Europe goes nuclear - September 01, 2008
Nuclear incidents have been popping up all over Europe in August. Perhaps the reddest faces will be at the International Atomic Energy Agency, which managed to spread plutonium over a whole storage room earlier this month.
Of course those faces will be red from embarrassment rather than radiation poisoning as independent tests have no confirmed that no radioactive material was released to the environment when pressure build up caused a vial to burst. Still, Reuters says the leak at the Seibersdorf lab “raised a stir in Austria” which rejects nuclear energy as “fundamentally dangerous”.
The agency says:
According to the IAEA´s nuclear regulator´s assessment of the incident, the lab´s safety systems worked properly and successfully contained the contamination. The incident was rated as level 1 (anomaly) on the Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) of events. The INES scale has seven categories, the most serious being a ‘major accident’.
Belgium is dealing with its own nuclear problem after radioactive iodine gas leaked from a medical lab near the town of Fleurus. Reports last week said the problem was “worse than had initially been thought” and it was assessed as a three on the INES scale, locals were warned not to eat food from their gardens.
Later the safety zone for ‘don’t eat’ warnings was reduced, but as AFP noted:
Hospitals in several countries could face a shortage of medical radioisotopes used for imaging and treating cancer after the laboratory halted production following the iodine leak, the institute said Wednesday.
This could be a real problem, because, as those who have browsed Nature News this morning will know “Technical glitches at a Dutch nuclear reactor that produces medical isotopes could lead to rationing of medical tests and treatments across Europe” (see: Isotope shortage could delay cancer treatments).
The European Association of Nuclear Medicine has called an emergency meeting to deal with this problem; it’s likely to be held on Wednesday in Brussels. Maybe they could pop down the road and borrow some of the IAEA’s isotopes?*
*Disclaimer: the Great Beyond is aware this is not actually feasible.
Image: Punchstock
