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Police hunt radioactive waste dumper in Banten
Radioactive: Officials from the Nuclear Energy Regulatory Agency (Bapeten) and the National Nuclear Energy Agency (Batan) load containers filled with soil contaminated with Cesium-137, a radioactive substance, onto a truck at the Batan Indah housing complex in South Tangerang, Banten, on Sunday
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adioactive: Officials from the Nuclear Energy Regulatory Agency (Bapeten) and the National Nuclear Energy Agency (Batan) load containers filled with soil contaminated with Cesium-137, a radioactive substance, onto a truck at the Batan Indah housing complex in South Tangerang, Banten, on Sunday. Bapeten and Batan will require 20 days to decontaminate the area. (JP/Dhoni Setiawan)
The 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.
Bapeten, the National Nuclear Energy Agency (Batan), and the Research and Technology Ministry — which supervises the two agencies — are adamant in saying that the hazardous materials did not come from the nuclear reactors, but rather from industrial sources. Yet, the source of the material remains unclear to date.
“No leakage was found in the reactors and the location of the reactors is 5 km away from the Batan Indah complex,” Research and Technology Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro told a press conference on Tuesday, referring to the Center for Science and Technology Research (Puspiptek) office complex, which houses several small reactors for research purposes.
“This is not a nuclear accident, it’s either a crime or the result of very serious negligence. The presence of radioactive materials in the residential area is indeed unusual,” he added.
Bapeten has nine detectors in Puspiptek to monitor the nuclear reactors, according to Jazi. “If a leakage occurred, we would have been notified,” he said.
Such radioactive waste should be sent to a disposal facility (PLTR) owned by Batan in Serpong, South Tangerang, to be processed, according to a 2013 Government Regulation on radioactive waste management.
Jazi said there were various motives for the unlawful dumping, which any police investigation would consider thoroughly. “The violator who dumped the radioactive waste at Batan Indah could be charged with a criminal act,” he said, without detailing the potential charges.
Several regulations ban illegal waste dumping, for instance, the 1997 Law on nuclear power that requires low and medium level radioactive waste producers to collect or group waste before delivering it to a disposal facility. Meanwhile, high level radioactive waste producers must temporarily store waste during the nuclear reactor operation. Violations in connection with high-level radioactive waste are punishable by five years’ imprisonment or a maximum fine of Rp 300 million (US$21,900), while violations in connection with low- and medium- level radioactive waste face a maximum fine of Rp 100 million.
Meanwhile, the 2009 Environment Protection and Management Law says that unlawful dumping of any kind of waste is an offense punishable by a maximum of three years’ imprisonment and a fine of up to Rp 3 billion.
Another National Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Argo Yuwono told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday that the police were still collecting information and, therefore, he could not explain the details of their investigation. “Just wait for the investigators’ [report],” he said.
As of Tuesday, the authorities had collected 107 drums of soil and vegetation from the exposed area to further reduce the radiation levels. Radiation levels had fallen from 98.9 microSieverts per hour on Sunday to 28 microSieverts per hour on Monday. The tolerance limit for a human to radiation is 0.11 microSieverts per hour.
South Tangerang Mayor Airin Rachmi Diany urged the public to remain calm and wait for the results of the police investigation. “The waste was buried under the soil, it might have been there for a long time so I don’t want to make any assumptions. However, the residents have been very cooperative in the decontamination process,” she said. (aly)
