Tokyo, December 06: Russian police in the Pacific port city of Vladivostok have confiscated a shipping container from Japan holding dozens of radioactive car tires.
According to a port official a total 29 tires in the shipment were emitting high levels of gamma and beta rays, the Interfax news agency reported on Thursday.
“There’s a good chance the radioactive tires are a result of the Fukushima accident,” said a safety inspector, Ivan Skogorev.
Skogorev said that the tires’ owner might have them decontaminated, returned to Japan or dumped in a dangerous waste site in Russia.
Earlier in April, Vladivostok custom officials suspended a shipment of 49 radioactive contaminated automobiles from Japan, some of which were found to emit hazardous isotopes at six times safe levels. A similar incident was also reported in June.
Russia’s Far Eastern region is a key consumer of second-hand Japanese cars.
A destructive 9-magnitude earthquake and an ensuing tsunami struck Japan’s northern coasts on March 11, setting off a nuclear crisis by knocking out power to cooling systems of reactors at the Fukushima plant and causing radioactive leaks.
On November 18, The Japan Times reported that large areas of eastern and northeastern Japan were probably contaminated with concentrations of cesium-137.
——-Agencies