Marshall Island copper hunters warned of radiation risk

Transcript

Marshall Islanders are being warned that digging for copper around a nuclear waste dump could expose them to harmful radiation.

People have been searching out copper wire and cabling around a storage bunker for the radioactive waste produced from US nuclear testing during the 1950s and '60s.

Concerns over damage to the concrete dome after a recent typhoon led to an expedition.

A member of the monitoring group, Terry Hamilton, told Koro Vaka'uta about their findings.   

TERRY HAMILTON: From the point of view of radiation exposure, it is not really one where we are too concerned about the Runit Island waste repository because that waste is contained in a concrete soil mixture that's then covered over with a concrete cap.  It's not readily accessible but there is significant levels of residual contamination in the soil.  One of the primary ways that you can be exposed to a contamination is through inhalation of resuspended dust.  Our concern there is that when people go digging for copper, they may expose themselves to elevated levels, particularly of the transuranium elements.  Runit in particular is one of the islands which contains the highest levels of plutonium contamination so our concern there was for the workers that are going up and digging in the soil.  What we have done to assess their exposure is we're conducting what we call plutonium bioessay analysis where we collect urine samples and test for the amount of plutonium that are in the worker's urine.  Fortunately the data to date shows that we do not see any elevated levels of exposure in the workers that we've identified but we advise that people should not be digging up in that soil or at least take some sort of precautions in terms of perhaps wearing a dust mask and reduce their possible exposure.

KORO VAKA'UTA:  How prevalent is it, the people going up there and digging for things like copper?

TH:  This is something that we observed perhaps starting about five years ago when the price of copper on the scrap market increased.  We conducted a survey of Runit Dome in 2013 and at the end of that mission I had Air Marshall Islands do a fly-over of Runit Dome and over the island.  It was then that I noticed some trenches that had been dug up the middle of the island.  It dates back at least two years.

KV:  That danger of the soil, is that something that will increase/decrease over time?  How does it work?

TH:  The problem with plutonium and in fact the reason for the clean up programme back through the '70s was that they addressed the need to clean up plutonium because they thought in terms of long term exposure that would be the main concerns.  Plutonium, one of the main isotopes of plutonium, Plutonium 239, has a half life of 24,000 years.  It's going to be around for a long, long time.