Lurking in the dunes along the highway just 50 kilometers south of the U.S.-Mexico
border city area of El Paso - Ciudad Juárez are heaps of uncontained
radioactive waste. The secret in the desert sands recently was revealed by
Mexican nuclear physicist Bernardo Salas Mar, a former employee of the federal
atomic power plant in Veracruz state who was fired after publicly disclosing
its radioactive contamination of the Gulf of Mexico.
Salas, now a professor at the Mexican National Autonomous University (UNAM),
investigated the border public health threat in cooperation with the rural
residents of the municipality of Samalayuca, adjacent to Ciudad Juárez,
in the northern state of Chihuahua. His field research turned up four mounds
of metal scraps, each about six cubic meters in size, exposed to wind and water.
The radiological inspection determined that the risk of radiation contamination
in the human food chain from this abandoned site warranted protective measures.
Salas, not an anti-nuclear activist but a proponent of safe use of nuclear
technology, recommended such drastic measures as burial of the waste and a
fence around it. The Sociedad Española de Protección Radiológica (Radiological
Protection Society of Spain) has invited him to present his findings at its
upcoming tenth national congress.
But like so many other prophets in their own lands, Salas encountered colleagues'
unwillingness to admit the results of his work in Mexico. Three domestic institutions
similar to the one in Spain refused to accept his conclusions at their congresses.
The Sociedad Mexicana de Seguridad Radiológica and the Sociedad
Nuclear Mexicana, told him the rejection was because he hadn't sought
permission to enter the abandoned lot where the waste is located. The Sociedad
Mexicana de Física would not answer his written request for its
reasons.
The location is on top of the burial grounds of other waste from what Chihuahua
journalist Ignacio Alvarado Álvarez calls the worst nuclear disaster
of this hemisphere, "Our Chernobyl." That is the fiasco that began
21 years ago in 1984 when guards at Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratories near Santa
Fe, New Mexico, detected a truckload of rebar from Old Mexico contaminated
by radioactive Cobalt-60.
It is a twisted tale typical of the bi-national boundary line's environmental
predicament. A U.S. gamma radiation chamber sent illegally to Mexico was scrapped
in Ciudad Juarez with other metal, which it contaminated. The contaminated
metal was made into the rebar and shipped for sale in the United States. Only
then was it discovered to be dangerously radioactive, and it was returned to
Mexico for confinement.
The defunct state-run Aceros de Chihuahua foundry made the rebar by
recycling material obtained at the Yonke Fenix. The Ciudad Juarez junkyard
is now famous because among the objects it received for resale was the gamma
radiation chamber with pellets of Cobalt-60 that the most expensive private
hospital in the city had acquired as contraband from a U.S. supplier.
U.S. importers of the resulting rebar were located. The rebar in the United
States was carted back to Mexico for burial. But south of the border many shipments
of recycled metal that different foundries made with the contaminated scrap
from the Fenix junkyard were delivered and never recovered for interment.
Perhaps the waste mounds that Salas verified are a miniscule part of what
somehow was picked up around the country.
Meanwhile, the radioactive construction material remains in at least half
the states in Mexico. Millions of people are being exposed to the elevated
radiation from the rebar in more than 17,000 shopping centers and public buildings,
according to conservative estimates. The harm, in terms of cancer and mutations,
to this and future generations is incalculable.
As the world reflects on the tragedy of radiation damage from the atomic
bomb explosions' destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 60 years ago during
the first week of August, the less obvious calamity of the Cobalt-60 contamination
in Mexico also continues.
The least society can do is admit to the mounds at Samalayuca and procure a proper
burial at the site.
Talli Nauman is a program associate at the Americas Program of the International Relations Center (online at www.irc-online.org). She originally published this opinion in her weekly column at The Herald Mexico, based at El Universal in Mexico City, as part of her independent media project Journalism to Raise Environmental Awareness, which she initiated with support from the MacArthur Foundation.
