Update: Radioactive cylinder may have been melted in Thailand

A search in Thailand for a missing power plant steel pipe that contained the radioactive element cesium-137 within it initially was reported as having ended with the pipe’s intact discovery at a scrap yard. Two days later, new reports say the steel tube was melted in a furnace adjacent to that scrap yard.

Wednesday, March 22, Thailand-based website TheThaiger.com, citing the governor of a Thai province, writes that the radioactive cylinder “was smelted in a furnace at Chow Steel Industries Public Co. Ltd.’s smelting factory in Prachin Buri province.”

On its website, Chow Steel Industries describes itself as a producer of steel billet “using scrap as [a] major raw material.” The company says it employs the electric arc furnace (EAF) production method at its mill “in Kabin Buri Industrial Estate, Prachin Buri Province.”

According to TheThaiger, which also cites the Thailand Public Broadcasting System (ThaiPBS), “Officials from the Office of Atoms for Peace detected cesium-137 in the furnace at the smelting factory [in the] Kabin Buri district yesterday.”

The news report indicates the Chow Steel campus has been closed and access to it restricted. The website also says if the cylinder was melted, it would have been “heated at 1,200 degrees Celsius (2,190 degrees Fahrenheit) with other metals,” and the noniron portions may have been blended into the furnace dust.

“At least 70 employees and residents near the factory are being prepared to undergo blood tests,” adds TheThaiger regarding potential radioactive contamination.

A doctor the website quotes was uncertain a furnace dust baghouse would in fact capture all of the cesium-137. He says instead, “If cesium-137 is fused, burned and vaporized, it can travel hundreds of thousands of kilometers depending on the wind [and] inflict harm on living things it comes into contact with.”

The doctor advises people who think they may have come into contact with cesium-137 that they “should watch out for symptoms like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and burning skin.”

Two days earlier, regional media reports in Southeast Asia indicated the tube or cylinder contained “dangerous levels” of the radioactive isotope.

Those same reports said a search for the cylinder came to a successful conclusion Sunday, March 19, when radiation detectors found it “at a smelting plant in [Thailand’s] Prachinburi’s Kabin Buri district, not far from the power plant where it had disappeared around one month ago,” according to the Coconuts Bangkok website.

An online report on the Khaosod English Thailand-based website says the search for the 12-inch-long cylinder “focused on steel recycling facilities, junk shops and secondhand stores.”

That website adds, “Luckily, the search team found it on Sunday, March 19, at one company in Hat Nang Kaeo Subdistrict, while scanning for radiation along the piles of scrap metal, including the compressed steel that will go into the furnace.”

According to the Ohio Department of Health, cesium-137 is used in industrial gauges that detect the flow of liquid through pipes. The element also is used in radiation detection equipment and in some medical radiation therapy devices, the agency adds.

In 1998, a medical device containing cesium-137 was removed from an abandoned hospital in the state of Goiás in Brazil. In that incident, according to media reports at that time, the device was handled by several people, resulting in four deaths. That device also was not melted in a furnace.

In 1984, however, radioactive material melted at an electric arc furnace (EAF) steel mill in Mexico was uncovered only after “the discovery of several hundred tons of radioactive metal from Mexico scattered through seven U.S. states,” according to a Washington Post article from that year.

Subsequently, a factory in Mexico that made steel table bases had to recall some 18,000 units to check for radiation, as it had taken a shipment of steel bars made at the EAF mill when the device was melted.