Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) has been entrusted with the responsibility of laying down safety standards, and framing rules and regulations covering regulatory and safety functions envisaged under the Atomic Energy Act, 1962. It was constituted on November 15, 1983 by the President of India by exercising the powers conferred by the Atomic Energy Act to carry out certain regulatory and safety functions under the Act. The stated mission of AERB is to ensure that the use of ionising radiation and nuclear energy in India does not cause unacceptable damage to the health of workers handling such materials and to the environment. However, in April 2010, one of India’s top educational institutions Delhi University which operates right under the ruling establishment has been found guilty of mishandling of a highly radioactive material Cobalt-60, categorised as a radioactive source ‘that can cause permanent injury to a person handling the material even for a short time without appropriate safety measures and protection, Co-60 is used in industrial applications such as industrial radiography cameras, nucleonic gauges for thickness measurement and in well-logging operations, and in medical equipment (Blood irradiators and radiotherapy units).
In utter disregard to safety norms and regulations aforesaid university auctioned various items including the instrument containing Cobalt 60, which ultimately landed up in a metal scrapyard in Mayapuri are of Delhi on 9th April,2010. In the junkyard workers got affected by radiation poisioning from the material while dismantling the instrument resulting in death of one person and hospitalised 6 others. Since then, the Crisis Management Group in the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and other officers from DAE and AERB have camped in the national capital with a range of radiation monitoring and detecting equipment for prompt identification and recovery of the radioactive pieces and their safe disposal. This piece of Cobalt 60 was manufactured by Atomic Energy Canada and bought by University in 1968 and was not being used since 1985.
This sounds bizzare, but it is not something that AERB has not seen before. India’s top radiation safety regulator has probed 16 such cases across the country since 2000 in which radioactive material was either stolen or lost. Equally responsible is administration of Delhi University for this mess, the university authorities in the Chemistry Department did not think twice before sending radioactive Gamma Cell Irradiator 220 lying unused for more than 25 years in a corner to a junk dealer in the heart of the capital. Ten academic experts who were part of the committee that approved disposal of this instrument - which had a Cobalt 60 source that could emit radiation for another billion seconds - without bothering about the stringent rules that govern such radioactive wastes. Under current regulations, the university is supposed to have a designated "radiological safety officer". Apparently, the university has flouted even this most basic regulatory requirement. If such a person had been there, he/she would have had the list of all radioactive materials within the campus and the experts committee would have at least been alerted about such equipment.
The regulatory system of inspection and monitoring put in place by the AERB, though detailed and elaborate, is actually not fool-proof. There have been instances year after year of loss and theft of sources from installations, particularly industrial sites. Most of these incidents, however, are not due to the inadequacy of the AERB's regulatory system but due to non-compliance and laxity on the part of the end-users. It is quite ironic that shortly after the Mayapuri incident AERB had issued revised guidelines pertaining to safety and security of radioactive materials and announced a special meeting on regulatory aspects of safety and security of industrial radiography sources. There have been many instances of thefts and other unusual occurences reported by AERB. The number of such incidents is not large considering that thousands of radiological sources have been distributed to users all over the country. But the seriousness of the radiological accidents demands that there should be zero-tolerance to such incidents. The periodic occurrences suggests that it is well within the realm of possibility that even domestic radioactive devices, supplied by the Board of Radiation and Isotope Technology (BRIT) and registered with the AERB, could end up in a scrap market. Such instances have occurred in the past and it is the stated mission of AERB to prevent such incidents which play havoc with the lives of common people. Some cases come to light too often like, in 2004, an industrial radiography source with a relatively high activity of 2.5 Curies (Ci) of Iridium-192 was stolen from the pit room of a radiography institute (later recovered), in Mumbai in 2005 a man stole a radioactive source and threw it into the Vashi Creek, in September 2008 a technician, about to board a train from the Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station, New Delhi lost his suitcase containing an Industrial Gamma Radiography Exposure Device. Despite an exhaustive search, the device could not be found. Such instances of radioactive materials changing hands puts question mark on the sincerity and integrity of AERB’s stated mission.
The news of radiation spread fast and International Atomic Energy Agency had become aware of the possibility of a serious radiation emergency at Mayapuri in New Delhi via media reports on April 9. It had also seen media reports of a fatality caused by exposure to radiation in Indian scrap metal yards and sought information. Accordingly, AERB sent full information under Incident Reporting System (IRS) as per mandatory requirement of the global nuclear watchdog and Illicit Trafficking Data Base (ITDB) of the agency. Department of Atomic Energy had confirmed the event, and the AERB had notified the IAEA that multiple Cobalt-60 sources had been located and secured.
The Cobalt 60 radiation tragedy has unearthed many issues and has brought up many systematic problems to the fore. It has become evident that our ports are porous to all kinds of waste and there are no scanners to detect what comes in, nuclear or otherwise. There seems to be no mechanism to track the illegal movement of radioactive matter through our transport system. Scrapyard dealers too suffer from lack of knowledge about safety norms, procedures and techniques to handle such waste. Moreover it is well known that India is one of the largest waste importing country. All types of waste are imported into India. Government data reveals that India even imports prohibited wastes like clinical waste, incineration ash, municipal waste and e-waste, all of which exceeds 50 lakh tonnes annually. India with a population of nearly 1.2 billion, human life has never been a premium in India Thousands die every year due to easily avoidable causes such as stampedes at temples, willful flouting of road safety rules particularly by state-run buses, people touching live electric wires left loose by government utilities and drowning in open manholes of sewage pipelines. Unfortunately, when the Mayapuri incident was reported, everybody got involved in a blame game and buck passing as usual. Mayapuri incident and related first death in India because of radiation poisoning calls for reevaluating the tracking and monitoring of such radioactive waste and also fixing responsibility for any radiation disaster. The Mayapuri-Delhi University case is an example where even people who should be aware of the risks were callous.
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