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"Trace amounts of cobalt-60 were found in standing water in the advanced off-gas piping tunnel Thursday at Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, said John Dreyfuss, Yankee's director of nuclear safety assurance, during a conference call with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Vermont Department of Health and the Vermont Department of Public Service. But Dreyfuss told the agencies that finding trace amounts of cobalt-60 in such a location is not surprising, just as was finding it in standing water in a pipe trench in the plant's radioactive waste building on Jan. 22. In that instance, cobalt-60, at 13,000 picocuries per liter, and zinc-65, at 2,460, were found, along with tritium, in the pipe trench. Drinking water limits for Cobalt-60 are 100 picocuries. For Zinc-65, the drinking water limit is 300. At the time, tritium levels were at 1.6 million picocuries, with a drinking water limit of 20,000. "

The UN nuclear watchdog said it has airlifted deadly radioactive cobalt materials out of Lebanon to safety in Russia. The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement that a plane carrying 36 Cobalt-60 sources -- each one radioactive enough to kill a person within minutes -- arrived in Russia from Lebanon on August 30. The cobalt materials, which came from an irradiator used for a long-defunct agricultural project, are now securely stored in Russia, the statement said. "Given the political situation in the Middle East and particularly in Lebanon we saw this source as vulnerable to malicious acts. If it was stolen it could cause a lot of damage to people," said Robin Heard, an IAEA radioactive source specialist who oversaw the mission.

Entergy Nuclear refused to say Wednesday how Cobalt 60, a radioactive byproduct of the nuclear fission process, ended up in the Connecticut River in 1997, an issue that surfaced earlier this week during a legislative hearing on radiation monitoring at the Vermont Yankee plant. Robert Williams said Entergy was preparing a report on the issue for the Committee on Administrative Rules and said it would decline further comment. Williams said Cobalt 60 had gotten into the storm drains at Vermont Yankee and had ended up in the Connecticut River as a result of a ventilation problem, but he declined to say how the Cobalt 60 got out of the plant itself.

Sources of cobalt-60 came loose at truck terminal A spokesman with the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency said Tuesday there was no spill of radioactive material at the Yellow Freight Roadway trucking terminal in West Knoxville, although he said the shielded sources of radioactive cobalt-60 did come loose from their transportation crate. "There were no leaks," said Jeremy Heidt of TEMA. He emphasized there was never a threat to public health or workers.

"New delhi Soumya is just 13, but she knows all about bone marrow transplants, radioactive sources and what exposure to radiation can do to the human body. She has first-hand experience, for her father Ajay Jain had been kept in isolation at the Army Research and Referral Hospital, undergoing treatment for exposure to a radiation source. Jain finally returned home on Thursday, more than a month after he was admitted to Max Hospital in Pitampura, on April 10, with a burn injury on the right side of his posterior. It took him another five days to realise that the piece of metal he had kept in his wallet for months had caused the injury. It turned out to be a piece of radioactive Cobalt-60. "

Exelon and GE Hitachi are considering a joint venture to produce the isotope cobalt-60 at Exelon's Clinton power reactor in Illinois, Exelon spokeswoman Krista Lopykinski said March 19. Co-60 is used in various medical applications and radioactive sources. On March 31, Exelon representatives and NRC staff will hold a meeting to discuss "a potential license application" by Exelon Generation regarding Co-60 production at Clinton, NRC said in a March 18 notice. Lopykinski declined to provide further details.

"Entergy Nuclear has hired a Washington, D.C., law firm to assist the company in its internal investigation over whether company officials lied to state regulators last year over the existence of radioactivity in buried pipes, which appear to be the source of increasing levels and types of radioactivity leaking at the Vernon reactor. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirmed Friday that cobalt-60 and zinc-65, which are much more dangerous radioactive isotopes than tritium, have also showed up in dangerous levels in an underground trench where tritium registered up to 2 million picocuries earlier in the week. Cobalt-60 registered at 13,000 picocuries, while the federal reportable levels are 100 picocuries per liter. For zinc-65, the level was 2,460, while the reportable level is 300 picocuries per liter. For tritium, the level is 20,000 picocuries for drinking water, and 30,000 picocuries in general. The most recent test in the trench for tritium put it at 1.6 million picocuries."

"Authorities at Delhi University in India say they are investigating how radioactive waste which this week killed a man was sold as scrap. On Wednesday, police said cobalt-60 had leaked from an irradiation machine sold by the university earlier this month. A scrap metal worker who was exposed to the radiation died on Monday of multiple organ failure. Several of his colleagues are still in hospital. They were exposed to radiation after dismantling the machine, police say. Search teams have found cobalt-60 in several shops in the scrap market in the city's Mayapuri industrial area. "

The leakage of radiation at a factory that sterilizes various foods has not polluted the environment in Kaifeng, Henan province, nor does it threaten public health, according to local environmental protection authorities. Officials are responding to widespread panic in the online community, who question the circumstances surrounding last month's leak of radioactive isotope cobalt-60 at the Limin Radiation Factory in Qi county of Kaifeng. The radioactive leak, which occurred on June 7, caused a fire at the factory a week later because workers were unable to control the radiation source. "The news of the harmful radiation leak, which caused panic among some residents, is a rumor and untrue," said an official of the Kaifeng Environmental Protection Bureau, who refused to be named. "Even furniture gives out some level of radiation," he added. The factory uses cobalt60 for the sterilization of pepper and the containers for the spice.

Court rules damages paid earlier 'adequate' Twelve victims of radiation poisoning have lost their appeal for 12 million baht in compensation from an engineering and electrical equipment distributor over its reckless storage of radioactive materials. Sonthaya: Right hand crippled SURAPOL PROMSAKA NA SAKOLNAKORN The members of the group claimed Kamol Sukosol Electric Co Ltd was negligent when it stored radioactive materials not properly secured in its car park. This allowed a cylinder of cobalt-60 - a radioactive isotope that can cause cancer - to be stolen from the company property. But the Appeals Court yesterday ruled in the company's favour saying the 640,276 baht in compensation the Civil Court had earlier ordered Kamol Sukosol to pay was sufficient.

Court rules damages paid earlier 'adequate' Twelve victims of radiation poisoning have lost their appeal for 12 million baht in compensation from an engineering and electrical equipment distributor over its reckless storage of radioactive materials. Sonthaya: Right hand crippled SURAPOL PROMSAKA NA SAKOLNAKORN The members of the group claimed Kamol Sukosol Electric Co Ltd was negligent when it stored radioactive materials not properly secured in its car park. This allowed a cylinder of cobalt-60 - a radioactive isotope that can cause cancer - to be stolen from the company property. But the Appeals Court yesterday ruled in the company's favour saying the 640,276 baht in compensation the Civil Court had earlier ordered Kamol Sukosol to pay was sufficient.

Call it the case of the glowing grater. When an ordinary household cheese grater set off radiation alarms at a Flint scrap metal recycling facility last month, workers were required to send it for testing -- and it turned out to contain the radioactive isotope Cobalt-60. The radiation levels weren't high enough to pose a danger, and the grater wasn't actually glowing. But one Nuclear Regulatory Commission official called the incident "reasonably rare."

Berlin - Germany is investigating 150 tons of steel items imported from India which were contaminated with radioactivity, the news magazine Der Spiegel said in an report to appear in its Monday issue. It said the most serious case was 5 tons of stainless steel wool which had to be disposed of by a nuclear-waste company, GNS. The contamination was thought to be the result of the radioactive isotope cobalt 60, which is used in nuclear medicine, being inadvertently mixed with steel scrap and being melted down at three Indian steel works. Anyone near the container of steel wool, which had been intercepted in August last year in the German port of Hamburg, would have received one millisievert of radiation in 24 hours. Spiegel said German regulations treated more that one millisievert in an entire year as unsafe.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ruled that more work needs to be done on an environmental assessment for a produce irradiator that's proposed for a location near Honolulu International Airport. Advertisement The commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board issued a ruling last week saying the NRC staff needs to consider alternate technology and sites in producing the assessment. The board's decision said it expects the staff to give meaningful consideration to transportation accidents in preparing a final environmental assessment. The ruling came after almost three years of discussion at the NRC, which has been considering Pa'ina Hawaii LLC's request to build an irradiator that would use up to a million curries of cobalt-60 to treat local fruits such as papayas, vegetables and other items so they can be shipped to the Mainland insect-free.

Residents fled a central Chinese county at the weekend over rumors of a radiation leak at a factory but most had returned by Monday after government assurances it was safe. The exodus was sparked Friday, when bystanders saw government workers at a factory using robots to examine a cobalt-60 irradiator that had malfunctioned. The irradiator is used mainly for sterilizing pepper powder, flavoring used in instant noodles and garlic. "There was chaos on the streets from about 2:30 p.m. until dark," Zhu Zhihai, manager of a different factory that processes garlic, told The Associated Press by telephone Monday. "All kinds of vehicles were going out of the county - farm vehicles, motorcycles and cars." He estimated that a third of the population of about 1 million in Qi county, Henan province, fled, many because they had heard rumors of explosions. Officials have not estimated the number who fled.

An Indiana manufacturer unknowingly used metal blended with a dangerous radioactive isotope to make parts for 1,000 La-Z-Boy recliners more than a decade ago. The discovery of that contamination -- which received virtually no publicity at the time -- triggered a federal and state effort to keep the popular chairs out of American living rooms, a Scripps Howard News Service investigation has found. The isotope -- Cobalt-60 -- used by No-Sag Products Co. of Kendallville, Ind., had been blended in Brazil into metal No-Sag used in 1998

"There is one thing for certain about Chile: the ground shakes and will continue to shake. Not only is the country located precariously on thePacific Ring of Fire with numerous volcanoes causing quakes and eruptions, but it is, as we know, also shaken by violent earthquakes and hit by tidal waves. And this is an inescapable reality that we must be ready to confront. No country with nuclear plants has undergone an earthquake of the magnitude experienced by Chile's central south, which reached 8.8 on the Richter scale. On July 16th 2007, Japan suffered an earthquake of 6.8 degrees. As a result of the quake the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, the largest in the world, with seven nuclear reactors supplying 12 per cent of Tokyo´s electricity, suffered total breakdown. And the collapse of the plant left numerous other problems in its wake, the worst being the spilling 1,200 liters of radioactive fluids into the sea, resulting in of contaminated water. There were also gas leaks of radioactive cobalt-60, and to make matters worse, hundreds of barrels with radioactive material fell from their storage places, some losing their seals and spilling part of their content. Furthermore, various evacuation pipes became disconnected, allowing toxic elements to escape. All this has been confirmed by Japan's own authorities."

"One more suspected source of radiation has been detected in the sprawling scrap market at Mayapuri here in the Capital where two scrap dealers and five workers were taken ill this past week after being exposed to Cobalt-60 radioactive isotope. Confirming this, B. Bhattacharjee, Member of the National Disaster Management Authority and former Director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, said on Tuesday: "We were informed about the detection of another radiation source today [Tuesday].""

Where are all the Indian workers suffering from radioactive radiation? How is occupational exposure recorded, how are victims diagnosed, provided legal remedy and compensated. A metal scrap dealer and four workers are being treated in Delhi for exposure to radioactive material, identified as Cobalt-60. They are in a serious condition. The radiation exposure happened in the Mayapuri locality of West Delhi in the last fortnight. A 1-kilometre radius around the shop was cordoned off as a precautionary measure. Experts from the Atomic Centre as well as National Security Guards have told police that the radiation is only in a limited area. This needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. A team was requisitioned from Mumbai-based Atomic Energy Regulatory Board which found during screening that radio-active emissions were coming from the scrap. The workers were exposed to a radioactive isotope under mysterious circumstances at a scrap market in West Delhi. The police suspect that the scrap consignment containing the metal piece was brought from neighboring Faridabad and that it originated from abroad. "

"DELHI University, blamed for dumping radioactive material that killed a man this week, buried 20 kilograms of other waste in a pit on campus, an academic claimed in a report published on Friday. Ramesh Chandra, a professor in the chemistry department, told the Times of India that his counterparts in the physics faculty had buried radioactive waste two decades ago after using the material in experiments. 'Instead of handling over the hazardous material... for proper disposal, they just buried it,' he said. 'Though it's been 20 years the buried isotopes of substances like uranium could still be active.' On Thursday, police blamed the university for dumping an irradiation machine containing radioactive cobalt-60 which ended up in scrapyard in New Delhi, where the waste killed a 35-year-old worker and put seven others in hospital."

"The death from radiation poisoning of a scrapyard worker in New Delhi has highlighted the lax enforcement of waste disposal laws in India, leading to calls for urgent action. In early April, a machine from Delhi University containing cobalt-60, a radioactive metal used for radiotherapy in hospitals, ended up in a scrapyard in the city. Rajendra Yadav, a 35-year-old worker in the congested yard in Mayapuri, western New Delhi, died due to multiple organ failure on April 26. Seven others were hospitalised. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it was the worst radiation incident worldwide in four years."