EVERETT – A shipment of ore containing radioactive uranium is heading from Kobe, Japan, to Everett later this month, Japanese officials said.
The Japan Atomic Energy Agency is sending 10,150 cubic feet of soil from a uranium ore plant in western Japan, said Atsushi Oku, an official of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.
According to a nuclear watchdog group, the contaminated soil is part of a larger amount stored at a processing plant that had been ordered disposed of by the Japanese Supreme Court.
Oku declined to disclose the destination of the ship, saying the ore was headed for disposal at an undisclosed location. But Port of Everett officials said that the vessel would arrive here later this month.
Port director John Mohr said officials from both governments have said the amount of uranium in the ore is at a very low level and does not pose a health hazard.
“All of the information we have is this material is unprocessed ore of a fairly low grade and does not require any sort of marking to go along with it,” said Mohr.
Ed Paskovskis, deputy port director, said the uranium levels are too low to require a hazardous materials label. He noted that even shipments of watches with florescent dials do require such warnings.
Paskovskis said that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has determined that the soils don’t require a special import license, another indicator of the low levels of the radioactive material.
Oku of the Japanese government said the soil will be sent to a company that will extract the uranium. He declined to give a name.
A watchdog group called Citizen’s Nuclear Information Center said the company is located in Utah.
The Everett shipment stems from an incident in 1988 in which abnormally high levels of radioactivity were found in soil in Yurihama in Tottori prefecture, where the Japanese atomic energy agency’s predecessor had a plant that extracted uranium from ore for enrichment, according to the CNIC.
In 2004, Japan’s Supreme Court ruled that the contaminated soil must be removed.
Officials had been looking for a place inside Japan to dispose of the soil, but could not find a suitable location, Oku said.
The amount sent to Everett is part of 105,000 cubic feet of contaminated soil at the processing plant.
Carl Wollebek, director of the port’s marine terminals, said the cargo will receive “all proper safety and handling procedures”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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