MEXICO CITY — Mexican troops and federal police kept a nighttime watch on a rural field where thieves abandoned a stolen shipment of highly radioactive cobalt-60, while officials began planning the delicate task of recovering the dangerous material.
Juan Eibenschutz, director general of the National Commission of Nuclear Safety and Safeguards, said late Wednesday that it could take at least two days to safely get the material into a secure container and transport it to a waste site.
“It’s a very delicate operation,” Eibenschutz said. “What’s important is that the material has been located and the place is being watched to guarantee no one gets close.”
The missing shipment of radioactive cobalt-60 was found Wednesday near where the stolen truck transporting the material was abandoned in central Mexico.
The highly radioactive material had been removed from its container, officials said, and one predicted that anyone involved in opening the box could be in grave danger of dying within days.
The cobalt-60 was left in a rural area about a half a mile from Hueypoxtla, a farm town of about 4,000 people, but it posed no threat to the residents and there was no evacuation, Eibenschutz said.
“Fortunately there are no people where the source of radioactivity is,” Eibenschutz said.
Townspeople complained they hadn’t been given any information about what had been found in the nearby field.
“We don’t know anything,” resident Jose Antonio Rosales told Milenio Television. “We don’t know if it’s good, if it’s bad. The authorities haven’t told us anything.”
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