Indonesia tests footwear returned from United States on Caesium-137 contamination fears

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JAKARTA (Reuters) -Indonesia is conducting further tests on footwear products returned from the United States following claims they had been contaminated with radioactive Caesium-137, a special government task force responsible for handling the issue said on Wednesday.

“We received information that contamination was found in footwear products exported to the United States,” said Bara Hasibuan, spokesman for the task force.

“After the investigation, we found two containers suspected to have Cs-137, and so they were then returned to Indonesia,” he said.

He said the footwear products came from a manufacturing company with the initials “NM”, which was located in Cikande but outside the Modern Cikande Industrial Estate, an area some 68 km (42 miles) from the capital Jakarta that is considered to be the epicentre of the radioactive contamination.

Hasibuan said the first container of footwear arrived in Indonesia a month ago and has not been inspected.

The second container was inspected by the nuclear agency and there were no traces of Caesium-137 on its surface, making it safe to store at the port.

Hasibuan said tests were now underway on the footwear products inside the container, adding that the contamination was airborne and probably originated in a scrap metal factory inside the industrial estate.

The contamination case was first detected in a batch of shrimp shipped to the United States in August by a local company. The United States has imposed new certification requirements for imports of shrimp and spices from Indonesia.

The task force also said it had finished the decontamination process at 22 facilities at the industrial estate where traces of Caesium-137 had been found.

Caesium-137 enters the environment as a result of past nuclear tests or accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima, but it is also used in some industrial applications like oil well logging.

Indonesia has no nuclear weapons or nuclear power plants.

(Reporting by Dewi Kurniawati; Editing by David Stanway)