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Police hunt radioactive waste dumper in Banten
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A team made up of members of the National Police Mobile Brigade bomb squad and the Nuclear Energy Regulatory Agency (Bapeten) detects radiation at the Batan Indah housing complex in Serpong, South Tangerang, Banten, on Feb. 15. (Antara/Muhammad Iqbal)
T
he Nuclear Energy Regulatory Agency (Bapeten) is working with the police to investigate the origins of the radioactive Caesium-137 waste found in the Batan Indah housing complex in South Tangerang, Banten, recently.
Bapeten manages around 14,000 permits for nuclear use across the country.
“We have the data of which industries use Caesium-137 but we don’t have the capacity to investigate how the materials ended up in that neighborhood. That’s why we are working with the police,” Bapeten head Jazi Eko Istiyanto said on Tuesday.
The Jakarta Police, the South Tangerang Police, the National Police’s forensics unit and criminal investigation department (Bareskrim) are currently probing the case.
“We examined the scene on Sunday. Bareskrim collected samples from the scene to be further analyzed,” National Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Asep Adi Saputra said as quoted by kompas.com on Monday.
The incident has been in the public spotlight for the past week after Bapeten detected a high level of radiation in a vacant lot next to a volleyball court in the housing complex during a regular detection survey on Jan. 30 and 31. Suspicions emerged that the radiation came from a leak at small nuclear reactors located about 5 kilometers from the housing complex.
A week later, the agency found material believed to be the source of the radiation in the lot and confirmed that the dangerous substance was the highly radioactive Caesium-137, which is commonly used for industrial purposes. The agency later confirmed the materials to be Caesium-137 and no more than that.
