German environment-ministry slides (2009) report Co-60-contaminated stainless steel from India at up to 600 Bq/g and frame the cause as an orphan source melted into production

materialsnuclearcobalt-60stainless-steelscrap-metalorphan-sourcehistorical

A presentation by staff of Germany's Federal Ministry for the Environment (BMU), given at the IAEA conference on inadvertent radioactive material in scrap metal (Tarragona, 23-27 February 2009), reports that "level of contamination found by January [was] up to 600 Bq/g" and that "more than 150 tons of material secured." Slide 4 says: "The detection of Co-60 contaminated stainless steel cuttings in a German scrap yard was the starting point for realizing the huge dimension of the issue."

The deck's scheme shows an "Orphan Source Co-60" entering a melting plant, then a product, then export. The slides give no assay tying a specific source to the Indian melts, so the orphan-source cause is the authors' framing, not a demonstrated attribution.

Scale: 600 Bq/g is about eight to nine orders of magnitude above the mBq/kg levels behind claim-pandax-ii-2016-modern-steel-still-required-scrap-avoidance-for-low-background — 600 Bq/g ≈ 6×10⁸ mBq/kg against that note's ~1 mBq/kg radiopurity scale. This is the accident tail, not the background baseline. It is the same source-in-the-charge family as claim-taiwan-1999-conference-abstract-documents-cobalt-60-sources-melted-in-arc-furnace-producing-contaminated-rebar, and like the rest of the cluster it names no atmospheric pathway (claim-no-primary-source-names-atmospheric-entrainment-as-steels-cobalt-60-pathway).