Residents near Pelindaba last Thursday, 5 August 2010, reported that they twice heard sirens around 8am from near NECSA’s Gate 3 to the Nuclear Complex. Both NECSA and the NNR deny that sirens went off at NECSA, passing it off as a possible hoax or “someone else’s siren”. A local block watch in the area was contacted but said they knew of none other than Necsa with sirens in the area.

Go to Important Info page for map

Initially not a single person at the communications division of NECSA could be reached around 8.30am Thursday – even on cell numbers – and finally NECSA’s Elliot Mulane answered his mobile. He was not at work but did phone back with his findings.

Both NECSA and the National Nuclear Regulator subsequently denied that sirens went off at Pelindaba that morning, but Mr Mulane said the routine siren tests had taken place on Monday the 2^nd August.

However:

1. Residents in the area were not notified about
2. Residents in the area say they did not hear Monday’s sirens (but NECSA said it happened)
3. The NNR admitted it had not been informed of the Monday tests. A spokesman said they should have been notified.

This is all very worrying for people who live in the region as they may never know when there is a real emergency at Pelindaba. Last year, after the sirens repeatedly went off over a period of month, we alerted the media and it turned out an emergency situation had triggered the sirens and confined all staff indoors. The siren was triggered by an abnormal release of “noble gas” during a regular production of isotopes.

Residents were not contacted at all. NECSA claimed the radioactive gases that escaped were contained within their fenced area (on a windy day!!!) We submitted numerous questions to the NNR over this incident – subjoined hereunder – and have still not had appropriate replies. Since this incident, sirens have not been heard again from Pelindaba – not even routine monthly siren tests – until Thursday morning. NECSA are supposed to test their sirens on the first Monday of every month but have stopped notifying residents, whether or not they continue this practice.

It is a mystery and residents have a right to know what’s going on. There are worrying health risks to children and mothers from the harmful effects of ionizing (man-made) radiation. You cannot see it, smell it, taste it yet it needs only the smallest particles to cause leukemia, a variety of cancers, spontaneous abortions and genetic abnormalities in unborn children.

THE QUESTIONS THE NNR HAVE NEVER ANSWERED:

The National Nuclear Regulator

Dear Gino Moonsamy and Thiagan Pather

Further to your media release, I am pleased to know the NNR will continue with its investigation. We trust you will inform us once this is complete, and ask that you indicate how long this investigation is likely to continue?

In terms of your legislated mandate to protect the environment, humans and property, however, I trust you will also provide us with answers to the following questions:

1. Can you confirm the chemical structure of the xenon and krypton that was released?
2. Can you confirm that the xenon and krypton were radioactive? If so, what can you tell us about the nature of that gamma radiation?
3. Can you confirm the suspected amount of the xenon and krypton that was released over legitimate levels? And for how long?
4. Please confirm the legal daily limit of these emissions?
5. Please outline known health and environmental implications of xenon and krypton – especially the particular Xe and Kr that is believed to have been released.
6. Please provide information on the exact building stack that triggered the alarm? Was it the Safari 1 reactor or another building, and if so, please name the building and describe the exact nature of the processes that take place in this building?
7. Since it was established within a short period after the emergency that xenon and krypton were released, could you indicate whether ANY emissions of ANY OTHER substance was released simultaneously, whether considered hazardous or not?
8. Why were no residents informed? Instead residents contacted Necsa to enquire about the alarms.
9. If the emergency warranted all personnel being mustered to safe designated areas behind locked doors, closed windows and switched off ventilators as indicated by NECSA’s Emergency Control Centre, why were the closest residents to Pelindaba not evacuated until the emergency was called off?
10. Mr. Rob Adam indicated to me personally that NECSA has detectors onsite and also off-site. Can you confirm this?
11. The emergency took place on a relatively windy day. What assurances are there that the event was of a localized nature?
12. Who is responsible for the emergency?
13. The NNR has indicated to Parliament last year it has a skills and manpower shortage. Is this likely to affect your investigation?
14. What will be done to prevent a recurrence of abnormal levels of radioactive emissions at Necsa’s Pelindaba site?
15. Can you please indicate how many other events of abnormal levels of radioactive emissions have been recorded at Pelindaba over the past that have warranted an on-site emergency– whether or not these were deemed to have posed a threat to the public and workers at the facilities or not.

Please can you ensure that I am on all your emailing lists? I sent you and other officials at the NNR an email request the night before the emergency at Pelindaba and have still received no reply, let alone a copy of your media release – which I now have via people based in the Cape! I am, as you know, a resident in the Pelindaba region.

It is sincerely hoped you will provide a prompt response to these questions in light of the now scaled-up activity at the Pelindaba Complex which makes it more imperative than ever that the public can rely on the NNR.

Sincerely

Dominique Gilbert

From: Gino Moonsamy [mailto:gmoonsamy@nnr.co.za]
Sent: 18 March 2009 09:49 AM
To: Pelindaba Working Group; Thiagan Pather
Subject: RE: Media Release – National Nuclear Regulator Assures Public of Safety – Pelindaba

Dear Dominic

Your contact details have been added to our mailing list.

Your enquiry is noted and currently being attended to.

best regards

Gino Moonsamy

National Nuclear Regulator

“Safety first, Safety always”

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/07/south_africas_dirty_bomb_myste_1.html

South Africa’s ‘dirty bomb’ mystery

If dirty bombs are such an overblown threat, and radioactive material so easily available, why are people still trying to steal it?

South African police are investigating what the five mokes busted with a Cesium-137 device at a Pretoria gas station last week were up to.
All of them are South African citizens, but not much else is known about them, police said.

Indeed, much about the July 9 incident is a mystery.

Authorities said the “industrial nuclear device” found with the men contained a small amount of radioactive material. The men intended to sell the device to parties unknown for 45 million Rand, the equivalent of$6 million to $7 million. Police said the men were also planning to sell a larger nuclear device, which police are searching for, according to South African reports.

“We don’t know what these suspects’ intentions were, and we need to find the device quickly,” police said, according to Canada’s online Digital Journal.

Likewise, South African authorities told SpyTalk over the weekend that “the origin of the device is still not known.”

South African reporter Graeme Hosken says the substance was of a type of Cesium used in South Africa’s mining industry. Cesium is also used in nuclear medicine and is manufactured in significant quantities at the Pelindaba nuclear plant near Pretoria.

Pelindaba was involved in another mysterious incident in 2007, when its highly guarded operations center was broken into by two armed gangs. One official was shot during the attack, which some believe was aimed at stealing highly enriched uranium. The case remains unsolved.

In last week’s incident, “there are no known linkages of the suspects with any groupings or persons from foreign countries,” according to a South African investigative file made available to SpyTalk. “None of them ever traveled across the SA borders.”

One of the suspects, Andre Le-Sar, 37,“ previously worked at the YSCOR arms factory in Van Der Bijl Park [an industrial zone south of Johannesburg],” according to one of the South African investigators, “but was unemployed at a stage and is now a self-employed plumber.”

No details could be learned about the four others being held, beyond their ages and residences of record.

But that’s just part of a larger mystery.

In 2002, U.S. intelligence sources, backed by Bush administration officials, reported in 2002 that al Qaeda had designs for a “dirty bomb.” Fears mushroomed that Washington and other Western capitals were unprepared to cope with such an attack, which involves salting conventional explosives with radioactive materials.

But the threat was hyped, many believe. The government eventually dropped its dirty-bomb conspiracy charges against American Jose Padilla, the Bush administration’s poster boy for the threat.

“Dirty bombs are very overblown,” says Richard Barlow, who once tracked black-market nuclear materials for the CIA and Defense Department. “There are vast quantities of available material out there if someone wanted to make one.”

The Washington Post’s Joby Warrick reported in 2002 that “U.S. businesses and medical facilities have lost track of nearly 1,500 pieces of equipment with radioactive parts since 1996. …”

Security of the materials has been tightened since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but experts say determined thieves wouldn’t have a hard time obtaining them.

Outside of a couple of Chechen plots against Moscow, and notwithstanding last week’s bust in Pretoria, the question remains: Why hasn’t a credible dirty bomb plot surfaced in the West since 9/11?

Graham Allison, a former assistant secretary of defense, said it may just be a matter of theatrics: al-Qaeda likes things that go boom — big, big boom. “Well, if you look at 9/11, and you look at al-Qaeda and their m.o., and you look at what they said, you know that they like big, spectacular events that kill large numbers of people,” Allison said on the PBS program “Nova” back in 2003.

A cesium plume lofted by dynamite, in other words, is peanuts compared with the real deal — a nuclear bomb.

“The press spokesman for Mr. bin Laden put out a rather chilling statement, which said that they’re required to kill four million Americans, including women and children, in order to balance the scale of the atrocities that we and the Israelis have visited upon the Arab population,” Allison said. “If you are trying to kill a lot of people at one time, you’re at the high end of violence, which is nuclear. There is something almost like the moth to the flame with respect to the nuclear threat.”

Not really comforting.

That leaves the last week’s mystery in Pretoria. With such hot goods virtually falling off trucks, how could even scam artists hope to fence cesium for upwards of $6 million, as the South African police believe?

Maybe the answer lies with P.T. Barnum: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” But who were those suckers in Pretoria?

Update: MSNBC’S Rachel Maddow picks up the story with a shout-out to SpyTalk.

They have vowed to stage a “sleep-in” at NECSA’s gates unless they are adequately responded to by the nuclear bosses. The memorandum they intend handing over is attached.NECSA memorandum 22 Jan 2010

When: Thursday February 4, 2010

Starting time: 10.30 am

Place: Necsa Gate 3, Church Street, Pelindaba (west of Pretoria) Contact person: Mr. Alfred Sepepe 074 299 8214

Many of these Atteridgeville Township based workers formed part of the sample group of 208 ex-nuclear workers who underwent preliminary medical examinations by respected occupational health medical practitioner Dr Murray Coombs. Coombs found that a significant number of these workers suffered from occupational illnesses resultant from their employment at the Pelindaba complex and referred several cases to the Compensation Commissioner. All these applications were rejected. The Commissioner has yet to make known the basis on which he dismissed these applications despite legislation which entitles these workers to compensation based on presumption alone. Coombs further concluded that most of the ex-workers he had seen needed further in-depth medical tests and in 2006 Dr. Coombs approached NECSA to undertake these tests in the presence of representatives appointed by the workers themselves to ensure transparency. NECSA flatly refused and produced its own medical results that denied the claims made in the Coombs Report.

Almost 30 ex-workers from the original sample group have died penniless and with extreme medical conditions since this process began in 2005/6 – this despite numerous appeals to the President, various Ministers and a special hearing before a Parliamentary Portfolio Committee in July 2007 which undertook to ensure justice and compensation for these workers. The chairman of that committee was dropped in the new post-elections administration and to date not a single promise made to these workers has been met.

Please contact Mr. Sepepe for further details.

This media release is issued by:

Pelindaba Working Group
acting in solidarity with the plight of these ex-nuclear workers
Dominique Gilbert – 083 740 4676