Radioactive scrap from India used to make lift buttons in France
French firm put buttons in hundreds of lifts over summer

India's nuclear authorities have admitted that radioactive scrap was exported from the country to make lift buttons in France.

French firm Mafelec had sent thousands of lift buttons to elevator-makers Otis, which put them in hundreds of lifts in the country over the summer.

Otis has said it is now removing the buttons, after France's Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) announced earlier this week that 20 workers who handled the lift buttons had been exposed to excessive levels of radiation.

In France workers were exposed to doses of radioactivity ranging from 1 to 3 millisievert (mSv). The French legal limit for people who do not work in the nuclear industry is 1 mSv per year.

The ASN said it had classified the incident at Mafelec at level 2 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The scale goes from zero, which means no safety risk, to 7, which means a major accident.

The French nuclear safety agency said the buttons contained traces of radioactive Cobalt 60. Four Indian firms produced the components, an Indian official said, but it was still unclear where the contaminated scrap originated – although metal had been traced to a foundry in the western state of Maharashtra.

Malafec brought the button from two Indian companies. They in turn purchased the raw materials from another company SKM Steels – which obtained it from a foundry near Khopoli on the way to Pune from Mumbai called Vipras. Vipras is believed to melted the scrap to get steel.

"We are tracking back the whole chain," Satya Pal Agarwal, head of the radiological safety division of India's Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, told AFP. Indian foundries are not required to install radiation detectors to check scrap, but the government has a programme to put radiation monitors at ports to check cargo.

(By Randeep Ramesh, The Guardian, 24/10/2008)