Radioactive dust was not dumped in Prachinburi field, officials tell villagers
Officials in Prachinburi province’s Si Maha Phot district told panicked local residents on Friday that radioactive dust from a recycling plant in the province was not dumped in an abandoned field near their homes.
The about 100 sacks found in the field in tambon Hua Wa contained soil purchased in Chonburi province, not dust from the recycling plant, officials said.
People living near the field became alarmed because the sacks that recently appeared in the field looked like the ones used to store dust seized from a recycling plant where a stolen cylinder containing Caesium-137 had been melted.
Officials from the government’s atomic agency, the Office of Atoms for Peace, seized 24 tonnes of dust from the recycling plant’s furnace after the cylinder containing Caesium-137 was traced to it.
The cylinder was reportedly stolen from National Power Plant 5A in Si Maha Phot on February 23, but managers at the plant did not tell officials at the atomic agency it was missing until March 10.
This triggered a frantic search for the cylinder as well as alarm among residents of the province.
Officials said on Friday that the sacks in the field in Si Maha Phot district were filled with soil sourced from Chonburi province.
Si Maha Phot district chief Ratchakrit Phayuk said he sent officials to investigate and alerted the Prachinburi industrial office, the Department of Environmental Quality Promotion and other agencies to examine the sacks.
Officials identified the owners of the sacks as a couple but released only their first names: Kosol and Samrarn.
They said they had set up a smelting workshop in the abandoned field to extract copper fragments from soil they had bought in Chonburi’s Ban Bueng district.
They began burning the soil in ovens made from 200-litre oil drums about 10 days ago, they said, adding that they had earned about 5,000 baht from the copper fragments they collected after burning off 1.8 tonnes of soil.
