MANAGING RADIUM
For much of this century, radium sources were widely used in medical and industrial applications all over the world. Because of radium's unfavorable characteristics, almost all countries now have stopped using the sources. About 30,000 spent radium sources now need to be safely stored and managed - many of them in the developing world. Radium's long half-life means that the sources eventually need to be disposed of in deep geological repositories, which are not available yet. For many years, the IAEA has been giving advice to countries on how radium sources can be conditioned for safe storage, pending their final disposal. But many countries do not have the technical infrastructure needed to ensure that the conditioning operation can be done properly and with the necessary quality assurance.
To address problems, the IAEA is providing hands-on assistance to developing countries that have stopped using radium sources. The approach involves the collection, treatment, and conditioning of all identified spent radium sources in a country by expert teams in a single campaign. The programme began in 1996 in the Latin American region, where four national campaigns now have been completed in Uruguay, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Chile. One campaign in the Europe and East Asia region was successfully completed in Croatia in 1997. For the near future, the Agency will use a similar approach to establish expert teams in the African and Asian regions.
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